Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

BLESSING BHUTAN: a mandala in seven movements


SPINNING

Pelela pass
wooden spindle whirling
sheep wool yak wool
bus wheels rolling rolling
round the chorten
wrap around bowstring
plaid gho
feet stomping dancers
black hats Tshechu twirling
prayer wheels turning round and round
humble hands round and round spinning wheels
water falling

FALLING
water pouring down cliffs canyons
powerful hydro
pungent splats of betel juice
feudal reign falls
reborn baby strapped on mother’s back
sliding sidewise his eyes crusty cracks

CRACKING
sidewalks roads
sides of the roads
overhangs cracking
stacks of straw burning running
skull cracking brains open raptor food
psyche cracking
deities demons delusions spill inside outside
Bhutan cracking open rocks crashing stories erupting
ancient lore stretching over reality canvas
spinning and falling portals flapping

FLAPPING
prayer flags astrological hues 108 blending
bright then fading
fluttering from hills bridges gossamer
spirits wafting among
daphne pulp porous through screens
fingers stack paper on
shutters snapping capture
orange chartreuse rice fields waving
buckwheat amaranth chilis
eagles magpie wings flapping high
blue dot butterfly fluttering low low

BLOWING
bronze horns rumble deep
out of earth little children sing anthems
tourists blow a mound of marijuana buds
suck hard small flame
black plastic smoking sky over
fractal forests
help and thank you
monks chant on and on
hungry ghosts opening throats
each breath a prayer

TAPPING
woodpecker staccato against blue pine
baby monk blesses with wooden phallus
light raps on head
Silther taps on window
hiking poles pony hooves clop to Tiger’s Nest
thanka painter dips brush into orange
onto the god of epilepsy
huge canvas explodes in color
finger holds steads
precision
steady

STILLNESS
target embraces its arrow
dragon tongue
bus stops
white bellied heron lands
dogs silent
just this moment
vast meditation
dead center of the wheel
spokes whirling out in five dimensions
most mysterious

- Sharon Bard
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The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

- Margaret Atwood

Pity The Nation
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose
sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully
as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by
torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but
its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation--oh, pity the people who allow
their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Pray for Peace

Pray to whomever you kneel down to:

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Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah, raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, Record Keeper
of time before, time now, time ahead, pray. Bow down
to terriers and shepherds and siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Pray to the bus driver who takes you to work,
pray on the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus
and for everyone riding buses all over the world.
If you haven't been on a bus in a long time,
climb the few steps, drop some silver, and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

Making love, of course, is already a prayer.
Skin and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile case we are poured into,
each caress a season of peace.

If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves
we will do less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas, pray for peace.

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Gnaw your crust
of prayer, scoop your prayer water from the gutter.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

- Ellen Bass

Walking

My dog hurries the path, worries its scents
As if one could goad the Earth, governed
As she is, by the gods of geology.

- Rebecca del Rio

O Captain! My Captain!

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O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.


O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills; 10
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.


My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; 20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

- Walt Whitman

Dominion

A mandrake quickens
into greed-grab, tears a page
from Genesis. Clods

of earth are clods of god.
Clods of earth are clods
of dendrites with dirt

skirting the roots.
Let there be light

skins and dark skins. One
to rule the other. Manifest,

destinations of night’s pitch
plague the heart’s
thirst for extinction.

Memory of the untouched
is the more beautiful object.

From the streets
a humpback’s gashed fin laments
this justice, its skin scarred

with extinction’s dark
body owned by light.

I strike a candle
against tribal ruin, against
the separation of day

and night.

- Rajiv Mohabi

The Front Door of God

Stop beating up on your ego, 

Trying to lynch it, 

Making it the scapegoat
For your misguided pain. 

Your ego is the front door of God,
The prow of the boat of your Godness 

Forever entering the next new port 

Of every fresh moment, 

The heat shield of the space capsule 

Of who you are be-coming in for a landing on a planet 

It was never really launched away from
To begin with: 
God Enworlding. 

Whose human ego 

Never does altogether 

Burn alive.
And shouldn't -
For God's sake

- Saniel Bonder

The Earth is my Mother

The wind is my Mother’s breath.

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Trees, flowers, birds and animals—
all are my beloved Mother.

The waves are my Mother’s cheeks,
the stones, my Mother’s feet.
Trees, flowers, birds and animals—
all are my beloved Mother.

The stars are my Mother’s crown,
the sun and moon, her eyes.
Trees, flowers, birds and animals—
all are my beloved Mother.

Oh Mother,
let all the world
be peaceful
and gentle.

Let all the women and children
who have been violated
be peaceful
and well.

Let all the men realize
they are not superior
to the plants or the animals,
the women or the children.
Let them be peaceful
and gentle.

Let us be peaceful
and gentle.

Mother Earth, it is not you
who need to be invoked—for you are always here!

But we your human children who today
must be invoked—who have abandoned you,
forgotten to call upon you, neglected to care for you,
failed to serve you and disregarded your needs.

Help us now to awaken and remember
our obligations to you and all Earth’s beings.

Let your spirit fill us with love, appreciation, joy
and overwhelming desire to serve you in all that we do.

May we think, speak and act as one family of one Mother
who gives life to all and when it is time, takes it away.

Guide us, Great Mother, in every decision we make,
every habit we develop, every action we undertake.
May we never forget you again, beloved Mother Earth,
beautiful and bountiful source, and resting place, and wonder.

- Janine Canan

Rapa Nui On Easter Island, How did the stone axe feel While swinging into the last tree’s trunk? Chopping, chopping, until it toppled to the earth. In the field brimming with daffodils smiling at the sun, what did it feel like To plant the first one

- Alan Cohen

The Damnedest Finest Ruins

	Put me somewhere west of East Street where there's nothin' left but dust,
	Where the lads are all a hustlin' and where everything's gone bust,
	Where the buildin's that are standin' sort of blink and blindly stare
	At the damndest finest ruins ever gazed on anywhere.

	Bully ruins - bricks and wall - through the night I've heard you call
	Sort of sorry for each other cause you had to burn and fall.
	From the Ferries to Van Ness you're a God-forsaken mess,
	But the damndest finest ruins - nothin' more or nothin' less.

	The strangers who come rubberin' and a huntin' souvenirs,
	The fools they try to tell us it will take a million years
	Before we can get started, so why don't we come and live
	And build our homes and factories upon land they've got to give.

	"Got to give"! why, on my soul, I would rather bore a hole
	And live right in the ashes than even move to Oakland's mole,
	If they'd all give me my pick of their buildin's proud and slick
	In the damndest finest ruins still I'd rather be a brick!

- L. W. Harris
(After the San Francisco earthquake April 18, 1906)

Song

Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waving.
Everything in wild nature fits into us,
as if truly part and parent of us.
The sun shines not on us but in us.
The rivers flow not past, but through us,
thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell
of the substance of our bodies,
Making them glide and sing.
The trees wave and the flowers bloom
in our bodies as well as our souls,
and every bird song, wind song,
and; tremendous storm song of the rocks
in the heart of the mountains is our song,
our very own, and sings our love.

- John Muir

It’s Morning

How every morning I wish to clutter your arms with jewels,
rubies no basket could hold, diamonds no velvet set.

It is simply the morning I offer,
and if not being explicit, this one,
with its white sky and the bare small shrug of the pepper tree leaves.

Such happiness is a color all its own.
Like purple or like dogs or birds.

Listen, you don’t even have to be here to get this.
Everything I say is already here behind your eyes.
The whole treasure, the whole loot is yours to loot and treasure.

For what could I add to the skin of your being alive?
What medal could I pin on your breast to douse that birth-given privilege?

Words come your way here because I’m proud to know you.
And I send this poem along as a casserole to your doormat.

Don’t worry. No one had died within. The sickness you talked to yourself about
actually went out with yesterday’s slops. Happiness

called from across the hedge. Happiness arrived in the comic jalopy
of this poem. It’s morning. It’s morning of everything!

- Bruce Moody

Let’s meet in a restaurant

Is food the enemy? Giving a dinner party has become an ordeal. I lie awake the night before figuring how to produce a feast that is vegan, gluten free, macrobiotic, avoiding all acidic fruit and tomatoes, wine, all nuts, low carb and still edible. Are beetles okay for vegans? Probably not. Forget chocolate ants or fried grasshoppers. Now my brains are cooked. Finally seven o’clock arrives and I produce the perfect meal. At each plate for supper, a bowl of cleanly washed pebbles. Enjoy!

- Marge Piercy

Reading Neruda While Waiting for an Ultrasound


We try hard not to fall into error - like trying to avoid the beehive, though it's where the honey is kept.
Autocorrect wants to make beehive Bernice, wants to turn Neruda into Jerusalem
My own eyes, when they spot The Redress of Poetry on my shelf, see The Red Dress of Poetry.
When i love you less than perfectly, it is the same.
When I am the sand in your soap, it is the same.
Peel back the edge for the honey.
- Michael Sierchio

Button
It likes both to enter and to leave,
actions it seems to feel as a kind of hide-and-seek.
It knows nothing of what the cloth believes
of its magus-like powers.
If fastening and unfastening are its nature,
it doesn't care about its nature.
It likes the caress of two fingers
against its slightly thickened edges.
It likes the scent and heat of the proximate body.
The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.
Amoralist, sensualist, dependent of cotton thread,
its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun,
calico and round.
Its understanding is the understanding
of honey and jasmine, of letting what happens come.
A button envies no neighbouring button,
no snap, knot, no polyester-braided toggle.
It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard.
It is its own story, completed.
Brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn.
Nor do old dreams of passion disturb it,
though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses
with the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils;
though once it followed - it did, I tell you - that wind for miles.
- Jane Hirshfield

Becoming

Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

- Jim Harrison

BEAUTIFUL! I've been aware, and once tried to write about the "physics" of our aging and mortality...how, were it not for such forces as friction, we would indeed live forever physically. Very tough to put in words, though. Bravo, Jim!

The Lost Hotels of Paris The Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. What a bargain. Like being young for a while. We are allowed to visit hearts of women, to go into their bodies so we feel no longer alone. We are permitted romantic love with its bounty and half-life of two years. It is right to mourn for the small hotels of Paris that used to be when we used to be. My mansard looking down on Notre Dame every morning is gone, and me listening to the bell at night. Venice is no more. The best Greek islands have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having not the keeping that is the treasure. Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon and said he was giving up poetry because it told lies, that language distorts. I agreed, but asked what we have that gets it right even that much. We look up at the stars and they are not there. We see the memory of when they were, once upon a time. And that too is more than enough.

- Jack Gilbert

What stays with me more than flames,
broken glass, crowds swarming the streets
after the non-indictment; the edge-of-screen
war correspondent clutching his mic,
reporting low-voiced to us outsiders,
are the tears running down
the young woman’s cheek,
that she keeps swiping, as she tries
to stay calm for the interview. It’s like —
and she starts again:
they don’t realize we’re human.
Not the fire but the broken heart.


- Susan Donnelly

Tears

Kathmandu April 2015

The clear round vase on the table
filled with water holds the world
upside down and magnified, reflecting
the chair-back, the shimmering birch
beyond the window. Deeper

into the woods, shadows
shield the mystery of what sleeps there
having roamed the night as we
turned toward and away and toward
and dreamed our separate dreams,
while the Kathmandu restaurant

whose narrow stone steps I climbed
tumbled into a world turned
upside down in a street no longer recognizable,
turned out of itself the way mayhem
casts out meaning –

this pot where the cook melted ghee
beside the splintered back
of a patron’s chair, this blue scarf
fluttering from the rubble as prayer flags
fluttered above the entrance. The stairs

speak to each other, mystified
by their new arrangement – the first step
grating against the eighth, the ninth
under the fourth, the third beside the fifth.
If this were music, their confusion might
convey the longing for harmony
lost inside the dissonance of chaos,
the moans and cries of the mortal world
with its icy rivers turned to salt.

- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

♥ ॐ love and prayers

From yesterday's Press Democrat:

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

Here are some organizations operating in the country and/or accepting donations toward their relief efforts:

UNICEF: unicef.org
Red Cross: redcross.org
Meercy Corps: mercycorps.org
Save the Children: savethechildren.org
Oxfam: oxfamamerica.org
Doctors Without Borders: doctorswithoutborders.org

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Tears

Kathmandu April 2015

...

---

Aftershock

I wake, but what day is this?
I remember sleeping, but this is the dream.
I am talking. I hear myself but I don’t know what I am saying.
There is traffic, but where are they going?
I could leave, but where would I go?
The high-rise ghosts have all gone.
We are neither dead nor alive.
The big dog barks. And barks.
Will there be a meal tonight?
We will eat with our fingers.
I wear the same clothes as yesterday.
I will wear them tomorrow.
The sky threatens rain.
The light comes and goes.
People appear and disappear.
After the anxiety comes the depression.
After the panic comes the wandering.
After the dying comes the remorse of the living.
After the undoing comes the doing.
Nothing is the same as before.
I can’t even remember before.
When we slept.

- Gary Horvitz
(from Kathmandu)

from Chris Smith's column in today's Press Democrat:

Hearts, minds and wallets open to Nepal following the devastating earthquake the likes of which we can imagine striking here, and that no doubt will.

“We couldn’t only be spectators,” said Adil Gauchan, whose family owns a Nepalese/Indian restaurant on Petaluma’s North McDowell Boulevard.

He invites us to come to Namaste Kitchen between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday or Sunday, enjoy a free buffet and make a donation to quake relief efforts of the Red Cross.

As an alternative, it’s easy to contribute $10 to any of several earthquake relief agencies. The charge will go onto your cellphone bill if you text:

· Give Nepal to 80888, Global Giving’s Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund.

· Nepal to 20222, Save the Children.

· Nepal to 864233, UNICEF.

· Reliefnepal to 45678, the UN World Food Program.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Aftershock...
- Gary Horvitz
(from Kathmandu)

---

Here is another good option for donations. Avaaz is supporting Abari, an in-country NGO that is putting up tents in the hardest hit remote areas. https://secure.avaaz.org/en/nepal_ea..._loc_be50/?dty


You can read Gary Horvitz’s blog posts here: https://spontaneouspresence.net/author/gary856/ Gary is a friend of mine - an amazing man who has been documenting his travels throughout Asia, with a Buddhist perspective. He went to Kathmandu to teach about climate change, and was there during the earthquake. He is trying to send reports, but electricity and internet access are very spotty.

Another friend of ours was on Everest during the avalanche, and we found out yesterday that he survived. We are happy to know this, and saddened by all of the death and destruction of this beautiful country and its people. Please give generously.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Aftershock...
- Gary Horvitz
(from Kathmandu)

---

Practice

Not the high mountain monastery
I had hoped for, the real
face of my spiritual practice
is this:
the sweat that pearls on my cheek
when I tell you the truth, my silent
cry in the night when I think
I’m alone, the trembling
in my own hand as I reach out
through the years of overcoming
to touch what I had hoped
I would never need again.
- Kim Rosen

thank you, gutsy and powerful! Gives solace to readers, who may not be ready to admit such things. Corresponds with much of my own experience, and also with Thomas Merton's lovely sentence,
"Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone."

hymn to the sacred body of the universe

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

for one instant
to dwell in the presence of the galaxies
for one instant
to live in the truth of the heart
the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is
“the secret One slowly growing a body”

two eagles are mating—
clasping each other’s claws
and turning cartwheels in the sky
grasses are blooming
grandfathers dying
consciousness blinking on and off
all of this is happening at once
all of this, vibrating into existence
out of nothingness

every particle
foaming into existence
transcribing the ineffable

arising and passing away
arising and passing away
23 trillion times per second—
when Buddha saw that,
he smiled

16 million tons of rain are falling every second
on the planet
an ocean
perpetually falling
and every drop
is your body
every motion, every feather, every thought
is your body
time
is your body,
and the infinite
curled inside like
invisible rainbows folded into light

every word of every tongue is love
telling a story to her own ears

let our lives be incense
burning
like a hymn to the sacred
body of the universe
my religion is rain
my religion is stone
my religion reveals itself to me in
sweaty epiphanies

every leaf, every river,
every animal,
your body
every creature trapped in the gears
of corporate nightmares
every species made extinct
was once
your body

10 million people are dreaming
that they’re flying
junipers and violets are blossoming
stars exploding and being born
god
is having
déjà vu
I am one
elaborate
crush
we cry petals
as the void
is singing

you are the dark
that holds the stars
in intimate
distance

that spun the whirling,
whirling,
world
into existence

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

- Drew Dellinger

North

I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,

those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship’s swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, ‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.’

- Seamus Heaney

Arcadia, Mars

To console myself, I wander
wing to wing in the orangery,
slip between twisted limbs,
olives’ silver and green. The air here
whisks so convincingly, I can’t believe
there’s a rock partition keeping me
safe from the pinked-out sky.
In Gethsemane—that ancient, other world—
they say the Virgin Mary
is buried in a similar grove.
They say any rock is agony. They say her grief
was deeper than those roots
(the oldest known on Earth).
Our own carbon dates us. If I could cut
myself open, you’d see rings
lapping more rings: my mother
crying for her mother in the same
way her mother wept for hers.
You’d see the silvery orbit,
where each life dissolved.
But for now, I remain
human. I am a nesting doll for griefs.
Even in utopia, there is suffering:
one sheep forced to walk
the labyrinth, ensuring the grass
regenerates. And my young daughter,
her legs thin as reeds,
chased and caught and pushed by
the boys again. Her layers stripped away.
Not even the olive he wedged
under her tongue
could hold her, clot those cries—
these shepherds, they think of nothing but
what might wake this weak blue soil.

- Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

N'em

They said to say goodnight
And not goodbye, unplugged
The TV when it rained. They hid
Money in mattresses
So to sleep on decisions.
Some of their children
Were not their children. Some
Of their parents had no birthdates.
They could sweat a cold out
Of you. They'd wake without
An alarm telling them to.
Even the short ones reached
Certain shelves. Even the skinny
Cooked animals too quick
To catch. And I don't care
How ugly one of them arrived,
That one got married
To somebody fine. They fed
Families with change and wiped
Their kitchens clean.
Then another century came.
People like me forgot their names.

- Jericho Brown


(The colloquialism of the title, which means "and them"—as in "Tell your mama and 'em I said hello—encompasses a host of people made familiar by the world of the poem. Most of us have known them: elders and distant ancestors whose way of being was rooted in the wisdom of folk knowledge, a generation now all but gone.)

Compassion

Have compassion for everyone you meet
Even if they don't want it.

What seems conceit, bad manners,
Or cynicism is always a sign
Of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on
Down there where the spirit meets the bone.

- Miller Williams

:heart:

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

...
Down there where the spirit meets the bone.

---

Wah!
powerful poem! thanks!

By the way, Miller Williams was the singer Lucinda Williams/s father.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Compassion
...
- Miller Williams

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Thanks, Roland. Enriches content and continuity. Jean

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

By the way, Miller Williams was the singer Lucinda Williams/s father.

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Blue

Dawn. I was just walking back across the tracks toward the loading docks when I saw a kid climb out of a boxcar, his blue jacket trailing like a skirt, and make for the fence. He'd hoisted a wet wooden flat of fresh fish on his right shoulder, and he tottered back and forth like someone with one leg shorter than the other. I took my glasses off and wiped them on the tails of my dirty shirt, and all I could see were the smudges of the men wakening one at a time and reaching for both the sky and the earth. My brother-in-law, Joseph, the railroad cop, who talked all day and all night of beer and pussy, Joseph in his suit shouting out my name, Pheeel! Pheeel! waving a blue bandana and pointing behind me to where the kid cleared the fence and the weak March sun had topped the car barns, to a pale, watery sky, wisps of dirty smoke, and the day.

- Phillip Levine

Saw In Louisiana A Live Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.

- Walt Whitman

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

What a perfect Mother's Day poem! Can't we ask Wendell Berry to help save the heart of the world?

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

To My Mother

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

---

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

What a perfect Mothers Day poem! Can't we ask Wendell Berry to help save the heart of the world?

---

I think he's on it!

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

Billy is definitely one of the best poets laureate we've ever had.

[More about Billy Collins here - Barry]

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Lanyard

...

- Billy Collins

---

We Have A Beautiful Mother


We have a beautiful

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...1_08-32-23.png

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

On The Death Of The Beloved

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn
Brightening over our lives
Awakening beneath the dark
A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice
Found for us
A new music
That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze
Quickened in the joy of its being;
You placed smiles like flowers
On the altar of the heart.
Your mind always sparkled
With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,
Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again

- John O’Donohue

Cloud Hidden

This chapter is closed now,
not one word more
until we meet some day
and the voices rising
to the window
take wing and fly.

Open the old casement
to the lands we have forgotten,
look
to the mountains and ridgeways
and the steep valleys,
quilted by green,
here, as the last words fall away,
the great and silent rivers of life
are flowing into the oceans
and on a day like any other
they will carry you again,
abandoned,
on the currents you have fought,
to the place
you did not know
you belonged.

- David Whyte

Just beautiful! Only the naked heart can write like that!

I HAVE to quote the little poem Alan Watts made famous, which my heart soaked up word for word and which I imagine accounts for the title David Whyte used:

"I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, "The Master's gone alone
herb-picking somewhere on the hill,
cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown."

Talking to Grief

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...4_15-57-43.png

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

- Denise Levertov

Ventilation

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...10-26-38-1.png

“Happiness sneaks in through a
door you didn’t know you left open.”
– John Barrymore

Become forgetful -
leave everything open.
On the wall,
there is a window,
in the corner
a small crack.

Doors lock, and
windows seal shut,
so force them -
do whatever you can.
Open them
from the inside out.

Happiness,
like fresh air,
flows through windows
past doors, sneaks
into places you’ve forgotten,
even in your heart.

- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Judean Date Palm

The dandelion seed needs
only the rumor of rain
to open its doors
and begin to unfold.

Some seeds, like the chaparral,
are only released
by the merciless grace
of fire and smoke.

Some must travel
the labyrinth
of an animal gut
for their casings to soften.

Still others, like the olive or date,
can sleep safely for centuries
until some crushing blow
awakens the mystery within.

I like to think that,
just before those zealots,
sure of their righteousness
and unbent before the legions
gathering on the plains below,
stepped into eternity,
one among them -
a child perhaps -
savored one final taste
of the sweetness of this life.

Two thousand years later
in Kibbutz Ketura
a young palm tree is growing
from the pit of that date
dropped on the heights of Masada
to await its own rebirth.

- Larry Robinson

Love This Miraculous World

Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.

- Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry brings it down to the simplest, understandable and most elegant.
"Reduced to the scale of our competence",
In other words: Think globally, act locally.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Love This Miraculous World
...
- Wendell Berry

---

w/Laguna De Santa Rosa

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Richard Nichols:

Wendell Berry brings it down to the simplest, understandable and most elegant.
"Reduced to the scale of our competence",
In other words: Think globally, act locally.

---

High School Senior For seventeen years, her breath in the house at night, puff, puff, like summer cumulus above her bed, and her scalp smelling of apricots — this being who had formed within me, squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night, like an eohippus she had come out of history slowly, through me, into the daylight, I had the daily sight of her, like food or air she was there, like a mother. I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell the difference between her leaving for college and our parting forever — I try to see this apartment without her, without her pure depth of feeling, without her creek-brown hair, her daedal hands with their tapered fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak's wing, but I can't. Seventeen years ago, in this room, she moved inside me, I looked at the river, I could not imagine my life with her. I gazed across the street, And saw, in the icy winter sun, a column of steam rush up away from the earth. There are creatures whose children float away at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for weeks and never see them again. My daughter is free and she is in me — no, my love of her is in me, moving in my heart, changing chambers, like something poured from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed. - Sharon Olds

Dawn
Dawn in New York has

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...9_08-26-44.png

four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
- Federico García Lorca

Gee, I've seen some lovely dawns in New York!
Still, I know what he's getting at. The poem makes its point well, powerful images.
Just saying, there's another side too... :wink:

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:

Gee, I've seen some lovely dawns in New York!
Still, I know what he's getting at. The poem makes its point well, powerful images.
Just saying, there's another side too... :wink:

---

Hey, everyone! I conducted an interview with Larry for my monthly literary column this past week, "Off the Page," and it's now live online! Check out the link here to learn all about your poem-a-day hero.
https://www.sonomawest.com/discoveri...2381867fc.html
-Michelle

Top image is granddaughter, bottom two are myself circa 1940. Even old excretory gases like myself appreciate poetry.

My Father's Letters

Every day my father writes
His life into being. He plants
Razor wire around the perimeter
Of his mind to keep out
The fog that steals the present,
Mines the paths of his memory.

He composes tiny tasks
To define the boundaries
Of his days and lives
In a country shrunken
By the success of survival.

Routine and ritual hold him
As they always have, as a mother
Holds her child, assures him
Of the moment's permanence,
The presence of only now.

Bound by a body less
And less, he walks
The borders of his dwindling
Spheres and touches the stillness
Of the Unknown to come.

- Rebecca del Rio

I Love Your Crazy Bones

Even your odds and ends.
I love your teeth, crazy bones,
Madcap knees and elbows.
Forearm and backhand
Hair makes you animal.
Rare among things.
The small of your back could pool rain
Into water a main might drink. Perfect,
From the whirlpools your fingers print
On everything you touch
To the moons on the nails of all ten toes
Rising and setting inside your shoes
Wherever you go.

- Barton Sutter

For The Courageous

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...2_09-36-42.png

You
who replants today despite unwelcoming soil
so tomorrow can be worthy of the roots;
Your children will grow up to be oak trees

You
who cracks lies
until the grass finds enough spine
to break concrete and taste rain
for the first time;
Your children will sing unconquered through hurricanes

You
who names the nameless
and speaks of their suffering
so we never forget the familiarity of their essence;
Your children will be unashamed of their reflection

You
who pushes against the jagged perimeters
thrusting your weight until you can mold freedom
regardless of the danger;
Your children will dance bravely through sorrow

You
who goes barefoot and empty handed
despite the heavy boots and gun you’ve been given
leaving destiny untouched;
Your children will be prophets,
have fate pressed against their eyes

You
who has been brave enough to move through the earthquakes of heart-break
and carry love into ancestry with permanence
Your children will forgive the ghosts that have haunted their nights
and open the door for their departure in the morning

- Alixa (of Climbing Poetree)

Group Of Men At A Meeting Table

In Imitation Of Tu Fu (712-770) As Translated By Carolyn Kizer

They shift down in their seats or sit off-center.
One leans forward.
Another bows over to write notes in his journal.
Like a good boy, that one sits, back-up, like a cadet.
I have no idea how I sit.

One speaks, then another.
I consider how independently each of us dresses.
Nothing beautiful. Nothing gaudy.
Even my own red does not stand out.

Outside, the dark is like a pearl.
The parking lot well-lit. We wander to our cars.
Scattering to get home. Discussions to-be-continued.
A perfume fills the air. Some sweet tree in bloom
smells like it has filled an entire world all day.

- Bruce Moody

Kyrie

Around midnight he took the oxycodone and listened to Arvo Pärt’s “I Am the True Vine” over and over, the snow falling harder now. He switched off the light and sat without dread of the coming hours, quietly singing along; he smoked any number of cigarettes without thinking once about the horrifying consequence; he was legibly told what to say and he wrote with mounting excitement and pleasure, and sent friendly e-mails to everyone, Lord I had such a good time and I don't regret anything — What happened to the prayer that goes like that? - Franz Wright

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE DIED


ELEH EZKERAH - These We Remember


Tis a fearful thing

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To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.


For your life has lived in me;
You laugh once lifted me;
Your word was a gift to me.


To remember this brings painful joy.


Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.

- J u d a h H a l e v i
(1 2 t h C e n t u r y )

Atlantic low

never to come by here again. And I do not know
what it is all about and I do not care
what it is all about, only that the sun comes
and touches me sometimes and touches the stone
and reminds me. There are trees
on the southern slope, their needles shift in the cloud, shift
under the mountain. Always there is cloud
on the mountain. I dream of the sun,
the sun which touches me when the river speaks,
sun which soaks the stone white, dissolves
the cloud, dissolves the mountain,
dissolves me in it. To be dissolved.

- Paul Kingnorth

For our joy take from my palms
a bit of sunlight and a bit of honey,
as Persephone's bees would have us do.

You can't unmoor a boat free floating,
nor hear a shadow whispering in its furs,
nor overcome the fear that burrows into life.

All that is left for us is kisses,
the downy ones like little bees
that perish once they've left the hive.

They rustle in the crystal labyrinth of night,
their home it is the dense forest of Taigetos,
their sustenance is cowslip, mint, and thyme.

Accept then my wild gift of joy,
this simple necklace made from withered bees
that died while turning honey into sunlight.

- Osip Mandelstam
(translated by Marina Romani)

below, a brief summary of the short, tragic life of Osip Mandlestram.
"Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osip_Mandelstam


Accept then my wild gift of joy,
this simple necklace made from withered bees
that died while turning honey into sunlight.

- Osip Mandelstam
(translated by Marina Romani)[/QUOTE]

A Single Secret Word


When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer keys to living things,
When people who about singing or kissing
Know deeper truths than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To the unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
and people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.


- Novalis (1800)
(Translated by Robert Bly)

For Adam

Life is a magic trick --
Appearing suddenly
out of a black top hat.

Newborns stare up, wide-eyed,
at the colored patterns on the
magician's tie.

Each life is stretched, slowly, into adulthood,
like knotted scarves pulled out of a pocket
too small to contain them.

Love pours out of an empty jar like water --
it is emptied, then made full, emptied
once again, then overflows.

And POOF! A sudden finale,
as the magician himself disappears
up the shirtsleeve of God.

- Lion Goodman

Breaking Surface

Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.

You are the only explorer.

- Mark Nepo

This guy is really good. Gets the "catalogue" of what not to be dissuaded by just right, imo.
Printing out. Putting on our fridge.
The ultimate compliment!
Thanks, Larry. Thanks Mark.
(Oops! Almost wrote "Thanks, Larry. Thanks, Moe. Thanks, Curly! :wink: )

You are the only explorer.

A two-fold good list:
what not to allow from others, and
what not to do to others.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Breaking Surface

Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.

You are the only explorer.

- Mark Nepo

---

Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong.
You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.
That is where you came from and where you’ll return.
You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love.
Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love.
Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up. Often.
You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And then to rise again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives.
It doesn’t require modifiers
It doesn’t require the condition of perfection.
It only asks that you show up. And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.
It’s enough. It’s plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

Thanks, Larry. I needed this today.

Pretty much every day, but especially this day.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong.
You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.
That is where you came from and where you’ll return.
You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love.
Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love.
Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up. Often.
You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And then to rise again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives.
It doesn’t require modifiers
It doesn’t require the condition of perfection.
It only asks that you show up. And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.
It’s enough. It’s plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

---

What the Dust Doesn’t Know

Even this runt, dust-hugging
cactus with nothing to commend
its spiked flesh has a lover

once a year when
the red tent of a calyx,
bursting from its crown of thorns,

is ravished by a bee-like creature,
which wallows in that bristling
pollen cup, then staggers into air

bearing a scrim of dust,
dusting all its other crimson lovers
on the slope, which swell

with purpled fruit, also thorned--
like Jesus on his tree, waiting
for the two Marys to steal past

the dozing Roman guards at midnight
and pluck the tender fruit of his body
from its bed of nails

and consume it,
then pass
the nearly invisible seeds,

which shall rise again
from their fecal tombs. As Life--
barbed and pug ugly

nailed to its crucifix of matter.
But, don’t forget, the nails
are there to nail down

something precious,
however fleetingly
it flowers, it fruits--

something
the dust does not
know, this is what

the lover knows.

- Richard Schiffman

Earth

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

- Derek Walcott

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)


Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be


For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap


And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Respect Your Elders

When you see me sitting quietly,
Like a sack left on the shelf,
Don’t think I need your chattering.
I’m listening to myself.
Hold! Stop! Don’t pity me! Hold!
Stop your sympathy!
Understanding if you’ve got it,
Otherwise I’ll do without it!
...When you see me walking, stumbling,
Don’t study and get it wrong.
‘Cause tired don’t mean lazy
And every goodbye ain’t gone.
I’m the same person I was back then,
A little less hair, a little less chin,
A lot less lungs, much less wind.
But ain’t I lucky I can still breathe in…

- Maya Angelou

Oh Mockingbird!

now that leaves
have obscured the branches
you, too, are hidden
and I am left with only your voice
your continual presence

- Fran Claggett

The Municipal Gallery Revisited


I
Arround me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,
'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'
Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.

III
Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,
Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV
Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;
A great ebullient portrait certainly;
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility?
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.

V
My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, 'My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI
(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII
And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,
'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

- William Butler Yeats

In the Evening

The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

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the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

- Billy Collins

Song Weaver

for Ronnie Gilbert

"Good night, Irene,"
she sang, "Good night, Irene,
I'll see you in my dreams."
& with her pals
belted out other songs
wishing for a hammer
enough to scare a paranoid
government to black-list them.
Fear was not one of her fears -
her sense of outrage at injustice
was too great - & also was her hope.
When she came on stage
there was no doubt who filled it
& her voice was strong for those
who had none. When she was born,
they say, she was put into a red diaper;
perhaps it was that she turned into a flag
to frighten the bulls that shat
upon the tatters of what
they called "our democracy."
She was not to be taken in
by "Freedom Acts" that tainted
not a bit her unfettered laughter;
she was too big for that as was her heart.

So Long, dear friend, it's been good
to know yuh & I know when you get
to that other place you'll teach the angels
some songs worth their singing.

- Rafael Jesús González

Ah, such a large-hearted--and belted out--way to learn about the death of this great lady. Terrific title. (Not sure she'd have been a believer in angels, though.) Janet

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Song Weaver

for Ronnie Gilbert

"Good night, Irene,"
she sang, "Good night, Irene,
I'll see you in my dreams."
& with her pals...

---

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
The morning air is all awash with angels…
- Richard Wilbur
The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.
I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?
Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because
He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,
I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father
Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—
How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee
This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—
And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs
At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.
- Sherman Alexie

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

Half-Mexican

Odd to be a half-Mexican, let me put it this way

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I am Mexican + Mexican, then there’s the question of the half
To say Mexican without the half, well it means another thing
One could say only Mexican
Then think of pyramids – obsidian flaw, flame etchings, goddesses with
Flayed visages claw feet & skulls as belts – these are not Mexican
They are existences, that is to say
Slavery, sinew, hearts shredded sacrifices for the continuum
Quarks & galaxies, the cosmic milk that flows into trees
Then darkness
What is the other – yes
It is Mexican too, yet it is formless, it is speckled with particles
European pieces? To say colony or power is incorrect
Better to think of Kant in his tiny room
Shuffling in his black socks seeking out the notion of time
Or Einstein re-working the erroneous equation
Concerning the way light bends – all this has to do with
The half, the half-thing when you are a half-being
Time
Light
How they stalk you & how you beseech them
All this becomes your life-long project, that is
You are Mexican. One half Mexican the other half
Mexican, then the half against itself.

- Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is America's new Poet Laureate

I Want To Write Different Words For You

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I want to write different words for you
To invent a language for you alone
To fit the size of your body
And the size of my love.


I want to travel away from the dictionary
And to leave my lips
I am tired of my mouth
I want a different one
Which can change
Into a cherry tree or a match box,
A mouth from which words can emerge
Like nymphs from the sea,
Like white chicks jumping from the magician’s hat.

- Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998)
(translated by Bassam K. Frangieh
and Clementina R. Brown)

Imaginary Dokusan: Perfume

Crushed lime halves in the sink,

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a wood match's sweet-acrid strike...

I keep looking for things with a beauty
that's not incidental, but have found none.
Because of this, the difference between sensuality

and being fully awake in the moment
is often unclear to me, for example

the sun's smell of ripening
even in things still immature—
which of the two pleasure is that?

- Chase Twichell

A Dialogue Of Self And Soul

My Soul, I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

My Self, The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn

My Soul, Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self, Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul, Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

My Self, A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

- William Butler Yeats

A Beauty Blessing


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


- John O'Donohue

What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?

I don’t want to change
my thoughts.
I want to change
the way I think.
I want to think
in images, in stories
spun as threads
arising long and slow
out of culture and
out of the Grandmother Spider
of indigenous mind.


I want to learn

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to live in the old ways,
the ways of spirit.
I want to see
the signs and the
deep, precise wisdom
of the true ones –
ancestors, elders, any and all
trying to inform us that
there is a way -
there is a way
to heal,
there is a way
to see,
there is a way
to change direction,
there is a way
to give the children
what they need
to be safe
to be listening
to be healthy
to be whole.


I, too,
want to be whole
all the way into
death and, yes,
I’ll say it,
beyond death,
beyond it but not beyond
the cycle of being -
the ring, the hoop of
being together.
This is the place where
Love remains, where
Love sustains, where
Love comes
into and through
all things.
Love is spirit
flowing into the life
of the world.
Knowing this
I am left with a question
to pose to myself:
What would an
indigenous grandmother do?


- Maya Spector

The Interview


Who are you when nobody’s looking? When
does your shadow appear? What gives it form?
Will you let us know when you’re triggered?
Will you stay present and engage with us,
if we are? How do you relate to sacrament?

Have you ever made love with the land? Felt
your own body stir with her gentle rhythms,
caressed her eagerly with your hands? Slipped
your nose inside her alert blossoms, sipping
their generous scent?

What are you passionate about? Where does
joy live inside you? Do you laugh with ease?
Can we laugh together? Are you friends with
grief? How well do you know yourself? Are
you willing to do the deep work.?

Who are you in the kitchen? Will we nourish
each other? What can we learn together?
What kind of alchemy can we co-create?
Do you flinch or welcome these probing
questions. Are you quiet on the inside?
Can we be quiet together? Together can
we come home to what’s sacred?


- Constance Miles

Choose Something Like A Star


O star (the fairest one in sight),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJZU8ixx8is

We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud---
It will not do to say of the night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell us something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

- Robert Frost

A series of 7 Frost poems were set to music by Randall Thompson, as some of you likely know, and are known as "Frostiana". In my high school Concert Choir, we sang this one and "The Road Not Taken". There's another tie-in: a few years ago, two poets from my high school in Missouri and I went together to one of Larry's "Oral Tradition" evenings in Sebastapol. We met in San Rafael and rode together the rest of the way. One friend had also been in Concert Choir, and she and I, on the way, sang the beautiful "The Road Not Taken", of which we both still remembered most of the words our parts in the music. If you want to hear that one, just Search on YouTube. Meanwhile, here's this one. Great poems, both. ♥ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJZU8ixx8is

This Morning


Up early
planned to swim half-a-mile
heard I’d promised my black dog
a good hike
OK

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walked out the door in my t-shirt
heard I need a pocket
my binoculars
OK
back in the house
changed shirts
into my car
drove towards the canyon loop
heard Corte Madera Estuary
OK
turned
parked near Basich
hiked down to the water
turned to the right
counter-clockwise loops
heard clockwise
resisted
then
OK
we all know this listening
as if we know how we should live
crossed the Bon Air Bridge
way low tide

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June
new moon
large ripples
in almost no water
waited
until someone surfaced
couldn’t quite see
turned clockwise
up the shoreline path
through binoculars
saw
this far up
way past null zone
whiskered
mud-covered head
of Harbor Seal


not seen here before

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then
further up the clockwise trail
a smaller head
binoculars
River Otter
and on the shore
yards from protection
Clapper Rail
all three gobbling fish
in the low low water
later
from the opposite shore
River Otter cavorting
in small lagoon
we all know this listening
listening.


- Trout Black

Sunday School Lesson in Oakridge, Tennessee

The teaching was so clear.

The golden fish were perfectly koi.

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Not channel cat in dark flat rivers
or darting trout in clear mountain waters.

No. In this man made pond on Black Oak Ridge
surrounded by blooming dogwood trees,
trees full of the Cardinal’s red flash and song
these miracles displayed their perfect beauty.

Silvery yellow white
Dotted gold orange
Angel wing tails
Rolling fat sleekness
In their water ballet.

Koi being perfectly who they are
in front of God and everyone.

I whisper to the koi,
“Namaste, beauties, namaste!”

- Doug von Koss

The River of Bees


In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older


Soon it will be fifteen years


He was old he will have fallen into his eyes


I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live


One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name


Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say


He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass


I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay


He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water


We are the echo of the future


On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live


- W. S. Merwin

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,’how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


- Mary Oliver

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
is how Mary Oliver ends the following poem. How would you answer this "Summer Day" question?

"Who made the grasshopper?" (saltamonte) she asks? How would you answer that question? So many questions, with so many different answers.

A grasshopper recently jumped on me as I was picking boysenberries, a fun summer activity here. I just sat down and looked at her. She stayed a while, moving her "jaws back and forth." Then she did float away, away, away.

It is a good time "to kneel down in the grass" and accept how "blessed" we are.
Saltamonte Shepherd

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,’how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


- Mary Oliver

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