Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

i am a little church

i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
- i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
- i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)


- e.e.cummings

Our Eyes Are Sweet Obedient Dogs

The mind must reach beyond time,
not revise or think at all;
thought is always late for truth.
Take the one bright element
from heaven on earth, the blazing
word inside the throat of rivers
and sky, desert and fields,
that will not burn, and speak
its flame without a sound.
Fire catches in sight and feeds
on gross imagination.
We do not see for fear
of burning here alive.

- Chard de Niord

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day.
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost -
For the grape' sake along the wall.

- Robert Frost

Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

- Dylan Thomas

God Does Not Answer Prayer

God does not answer prayer.
It is a sacrilege to think so.

An insult to the god-drenched hearts

of all who pray through the night

and in the morning are nonetheless

handed a dead child.


The churches in Salem used to burn heretics

to increase attendance. Now those who feel

their prayer didn't reach quite far enough,

that they were not pure enough,

are victims of a merciless atheism

that says all good fortune comes from God

though the brutal often prosper

and it is not uncommon to torture

the pure of heart.


We pray for the best, forgetting

the unpredictable unfolding

that must occur for us to learn

prayer for others works better

than for ourselves. Jesus prays

in the garden of Gethsemane

and is refused. Ten thousand,

ten million prayers rise in Latin,

Arabic, Hindi, and Hebrew


yet their husbands and wives,

children and sisters, fathers and brothers

do not survive well if at all

though in their chest beats the strong sacred heart.


No prayers are granted, none denied.

True prayer reaches well beyond the edge of the world.

It enters head bowed into the arms of the Beloved.


- Stephen Levine

To My Students

You who can read,
do not take it for granted;
you who cannot,
there are worlds, there are gods
yet to be quickened in your dreams.
The worlds await to form on your tongue,
the gods to tremble in your ears.

These little marks, black as fly-droppings
on the page, and as small,
speak to you - you do not hear.
I cannot tell you the beginning of naming,
only how it changes and magic
sparks and sputters at the base of the skull.
I do not know if there is answer;
perhaps our speaking is enough.
Men have died always alone;
these small blemishes on the page
their final legacy.
Do not lose them,
these the enchanted cinders
of our stars.

- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

(Rafael Jesus Gonzales turns 75 this coming Sunday, October 10, 2010)

Moss

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory
or an archetypal memory, but something far older - a
fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by
rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else
- standing up! - that hadn't yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of
course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like
blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier
moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees
and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,
I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing
upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.

- Mary Oliver

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter and inland among stones
The surface of the slate grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

- Seamus Heaney
(from Opened Ground)

The Distance

The distance between us
is holy ground
to be traversed
feet bare
hands raised
in joyous dance
so that once it is
crossed
the tracks of our pilgrimage
shine in the darkness
& light our coming together
in a bright & steady light.

- Rafael Jesús González

The Past

The past is an interest-bearing investment,
an estate enclosing more territory each day,

a delta always creating land.



Now, in my 60s,

I'm a great landowner,

a don unable to survey

all my holdings at once,

even from the highest hill.



To do so, I have to take

to the winding back roads.

Whole years I'd forgotten

come into view.

Everything is growing,

rooted in soil.

I didn't know the past blossomed

with such passionate, poignant flowers

or yielded such succulent fruit.



Blossoms have faces and speak.

Resurrected old homes straddle valleys.

Memories graze on hillsides.

I return from such excursions knowing

there are still more such loops. How

did the tiny sharecropper's yard

I knew as a young man

ever accrue to this? What Hand

has watered the once-arid precincts

and made them fertile?



I wonder, hearing people say,

“the past is dead”, when I find it so alive,

nearly as unknown, at times,

as what has not yet been dreamed,

and though I do not live in the past,

it is the foundation upon which I stand

- Max Reif

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

The engineer’s story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant’s story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team’s
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind’s
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent
The story of
not one thing only.

- Adrienne Rich

Excerpt for Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

- T.S. Eliot
(The Four Quartets)

Let Me Be Beautiful Like Sea Glass

Let my edges that cut be stroked by sand and salt
let my slick surface coarsen till it’s crushed to bits
let my colors soften as they scrape the bottom
let the waves love me in their rough way
let me be changed by that love
let me not forget I held another
yet fully inhabit my particularity
let me be smooth enough to be rubbed by small fingers
and slipped inside a pocket or a bowl
let me prove that beauty is born when something breaks

- Gwynn O’Gara

Hope

Old spirit, in and beyond me,
keep and extend me. Amid strangers
friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
see clear, reach deep. Open me to find due words,
that I may shape them to ploughshares of my own making.
After such luck, however late, give me to give to
the oldest dance.... Then to good sleep,
and - if it happens - glad waking.

- Philip Booth

First Rain

The first day of rain
should be declared
a natural holiday.

All stops, somehow.
A new season so simply turns.

All is immediate.
The instant of first wet on skin.
Sounds dance and mingle.
Soils, leaves, muddy waters
blend into deeply breathed
fragrances, become a
raw tonic
gone far too long.

We go through the day
cocooned.
A fire perhaps,
and time to enjoy it,
if we are lucky.

There’s something Sunday
about the first day of rain,
suspended between
today and
forever.

Memories take us,
deeper than words.
Further back than
recall can bring us.
Leave us off to
wander further beyond thought
to pure feeling,
back to some safety
of somewhere we
seem to have
lost.

Close the shops,
silence the clocks.
It’s the first day of rain.

- Scott O'Brien

For The Time Of Necessary Decision

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it's time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
We drift through this gray, increasing
nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul's desire.

- John O'Donohue

Fresh

To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?

- Naomi Shihab Nye

At Lake Scugog
1.

Where what I see comes to rest,

at the edge of the lake,

against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am

maintains an uneasy truce

with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin’s shade the gap between

the words I said

and those I remember saying

is just wide enough to contain

the remains that remain

of what I assumed I knew.


2.

Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

gingerly trades spots

with the person you are

and what I believe I believe

sits uncomfortably next to

what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you

what I want you to want,

you heard, or desired to hear,

something else. As, over and in the lake,

the cormorant and its image

traced paths through the sky.


- Troy Jollimore

The Chinese Peaks
For Donald Hall

I love the mountain peak
but I know also its rolling
foothills
half-invisible
in mist and fog.

The Seafarer gets up
long before dawn to read.
His soul
is a whale feeding
on the Holy Word.

The soul who loves the peak
also inhales the deep
breath rising
from the mountain
buried in mist.

- Robert Bly

The Man Watching


I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Robert Bly

I Found Myself in Walmart


Spiritually speaking
I was on a candy high.
Perhaps that is why
I found myself foraging
basket in hand
(while most others pushed
oversized carts
toward a supersized Nirvana)
among the cocoa harvests
of foreign lands.

You followed me reluctantly.
You love Wal-Mart
but you were puzzled.

"Eric" you said patiently
"what do you need?"

As you spoke
a shaft of light crashed
like a Chinese paratrooper
through the store's skylight.
It bounced off high stacked shelves.
It barged its way between
overweight shoppers
illuminating spandex mysteries.
It flashed upon my eyes
and I knew.

I knew that while our bodies
did not so often
pound love into speaking flames-
that I still wanted you,
only you,
just you,
not even candy.
Not cut-price plastic hole fillers,
not anything blue, green or yellow
seen on a T.V. in aisle 3
nor did I need more coffee
or anything.

How even here
in this warehouse of hope and light
we could find each other
like Adam discovering Eve
and Eve peeking at Adam
in their Garden of Eden
for the first time.
And how like Adam
I had found God.

- Eric Ashford

Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson's


"Where is your home," the interviewer asked him.

Here.

"No, no," the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
"when you are where you actually live."

Now it was his turn to think, perhaps the translation?

- Jane Hirshfield

Oil and Ash

What’s organic emits carbon when burned so animal
dung or dried seaweed picked from rocks or a child left
too long in the sun will all eventually rise toward the place
we used to think god lived: among the clouds on a big chair.

So apparently it’s come to this: the way to save the sky is sell
the sky to those who would release ash into it, through pipes.

I understand this economically, and I’d rather not
mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my
mouth it also fills with something called sky, each inhalation
drags sky across the fine hairs of my nostrils stirring them

in patterns resembling the locomotion of centipedes.
The inverted trees of my lungs filter sky into blood a shade

darker than a cardinal, blood so red it seems it should sing.
The seashell whorls of my ears hold barely two-thimbles-
worth of sky but without those twin pockets of stratosphere
thrumming my drums the world would fall as silent as a world

where they had inexplicably fed their own kind into steel machines.
Later, visiting archaeologists might ponder what had driven them

to do such a thing? There might be conjecture about belief systems
or native religions but for the first thousands of years there would be
nothing but the sound of ash sifting through dried leaves, a sound that is
in some ways similar—but also different—from the sound of falling snow.

- Michael Bazze

Rippling and Astir


There's a rippling
in the air

stealing



across the hillside

misty sheets

slant and race



towards

this terrible

thirst.



All green things

are dressed in

see-through pearls.



Droplets pounce

dance polkas on

wooden fenceposts.



Brushing, rushing

shimmering

bush and tree



limbs flap, sway

opening to

volleys' intensity.



A hushed soaring

roars.


- Raphael Block

Ripening

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done,
as much as by what we intend.
Our hair turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

- Wendell Berry

Sick and Old, Same As Ever:
a Poem to Figure It All Out

Splendor and ruin,
sorrow and joy,
long life or early death:
when this human realm's
a figment of prank
and whimsy,

is it really so strange
if I'm soon a bug's arm
or rat's liver?
And chicken skin
or crane plumage-
what would it hurt?

In yesterday's winds,
I was happy to begin
my long journey,
but today, in all this sunlit
warmth of spring,
I feel better.

And now that I'm packed
and ready for that
distant voyage,
what does it matter
if I linger on a little while
longer here?

- Po Chu-I

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.

No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

- Gregory Orr

Tor House

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:

Perhaps of my planted forest a few

May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard

With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.

Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art

To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:

It is the granite knoll on the granite

And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel

River-valley, these four will remain

In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind

Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;

You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from

Before the poles changed; and Orion in December

Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.

Come in the morning you will see white gulls

Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon

Their dance-companion, a ghost walking

By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.

My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably

Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind

With the mad wings and the day moon.

- Robinson Jeffers

Old Man, Old Man

Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?

He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

- David Wagoner

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action,
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

- Rabindranath Tagore