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(Sitin' on) The Dock of the Bay
Song by Otis Redding
Sittin' in the morning sun
I'll be sittin' when the evening comes
Watching the ships roll in
Then I watch them roll away again, yeah
I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time
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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Pomegranates
Hard pomegranates sundered
By excess of your seeds,
You make me think of mighty brows
Aburst with their discoveries!
If the suns you underwent,
O pomegranates severed,
Wrought your essence with the pride
To rend your ruby segments,
And if the dry gold of your shell
At instance of a power
Cracks in crimson gems of juice,
This luminous eruption
Sets a soul to dream upon
Its secret architecture.
- Paul Valéry
Les Grenades
Dures grenades entr'ouvertes
Cédent à l'excès des vos grains,
Je crois voir des fronts souverains
Eclatés de leurs découvertes!
Si les soleils par vous subis,
O grenades entre-bâillées,
Vous ont fait d'orgueil travaillées
Craquer les cloisons de rubis,
Et que si l'or sec de l'écorce
A la demande d'une force
Crève en gemmes rouges de jus,
Cette lumineuse rupture
Fait rÍver une âme que j'eus
De sa secrète architecture.
- Paul Valéry
Fire On The Hills
The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brushfire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the black slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders.
He had come from far off for good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue and the hills merciless black,
The somber-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.
- Robinson Jeffers
the beauty of things :: robinson jeffers
To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.
thanks, Larry ... Mr Jeffferson rocks.
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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Tashlikh
These are the days of awe -
time of inventory
and a new beginning
when harvest of what we sowed
comes in.
(What have we sown
of discord & terror?
Where have we fallen short
of justice?)
The scales dip & teeter;
there is so much
to discard,
so much to atone.
When our temples stood
we loaded a goat
with our transgressions
and sent it to the wild.
Now we must search our pockets
for crumbs of our trespasses,
our sins to cast upon the rivers.
The days are upon us
to take stock of our hearts.
It is time to dust
the images of our household gods,
our teraphim,
our lares.
- Rafael Jesús GonzálezTashlij
Estos son los días de temor -
tiempo del inventario
y un nuevo comienzo
cuando la cosecha de lo que sembramos
entra.
(¿Qué hemos sembrado
de discordia y terror?
¿Dónde hemos fallado
en la justicia?)
Las balanzas se inclinan y columpian;
hay tanto de que deshacerse,
tanto por lo cual expiar.
Cuando estaban en pie nuestros templos
cargábamos una cabra
con nuestros pecados
y la echábamos al desierto.
Ahora tenemos que buscar en los bolsillos
las migas de nuestras faltas,
nuestros pecados para echarlos a los ríos.
Están sobre nosotros los días
para hacer inventario del corazón.
Es tiempo de sacudir
las imagines de nuestros dioses domésticos,
nuestros térafim,
nuestros lares.
- Rafael Jesús González
Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a
card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy somethin
they will call you. When they wnat you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- Wendell Berry
Ode To Tomatoes
The street
filled with tomatoes
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera,
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhausible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.
- Pablo Neruda
Where the still small voice lives
Rosh Hashanah Poem 2015
This past year, how many times have you said to yourself
I knew it! I just KNEW it!!
I knew I shouldn’t have done that (but you did it)
I knew I should have done this (but you didn’t)
Between this knowing and that inconsistent action
Is noise
The bantering, whimpering, cajoling, cantankerous and singsong
Sound of our internal voices
It’s a cacophony of conflicting desires, wants and needs
That fills a giant internal tent
A 3 (million) ring circus at its center
Each act vying for our attention
Some with very strong opinions
Today one ring takes center stage and asks of us
Only one thing
Silence
The still small voice lives in this silence
The silence exists
Where time meets space
Where the void merges with eternity
Where Adonai resides with Eloheinu
This Silence with its answers and guidance
Lives in the sigh of a baby as it drifts to sleep
In the pause of breath in a passionate kiss
In the inhale between grief-filled sobs
The voice that speaks from this silence
Is soundless with texture and temperature
Or booms with flashing neon lights
Or comes on silent owl wings
This is the time of year to rejoice that another year
Has come and lived us fully and completely
In the noisy world of thought
We contemplate our successes and regrets
Our growth and losses
In the silence that the New Year invites
Is the chance to hear the Truth
Of how we really lived our days
To learn, or to regret?
To forgive, or be forgiven?
Between our knowing and our action
Is where the still small voice lives
This voice needs air
Breath
This voice needs space
Be quiet, still yourself
Pause
Wait
- Sally Churgel
Summer’s End
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...0_16-23-04.pngAt 4:38 a.m. a mockingbird wakes to begin her concert. She prefers the topmost branches of the sycamore tree next door where she’s taken up residence. Throughout the day she entertains with a rapid succession of trills and chirps.
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...16-23-04-1.png
Meanwhile, in the fig tree
a blue jay wipes its beak
against a branch
From April to October the “national pastime” follows the long arc of the growing season. The highs and lows, wins and losses. Now, baseball is reaching its climax with the World Series and it too will soon go dormant.
Game-ending error
shortstop stares into his glove
-- the crowd … stunned silent
This afternoon entire trees are on fire. The liquidambars in the neighborhood proclaim the season with a spectacle of trees aglow in yellow, russet, and crimson.
Falling maple leaf
catches the sun’s failing light
for the last time
It’s time once again for the autumnal ritual of cleaning the gutters—another reminder that the road ahead is shorter than the one I’ve already traveled.
- andrew zarrillo
We Breathe You
There was a curious dusting of a talcum-like substance on my car one morning last week.
I drove away. It flew off, disappearing into the air.
Then it came to me.
The fires.
The terrible, terrible fires reducing your homes, your towns, even some of you into fine ash and carried on the wind thirty, forty, fifty, miles off.
We read newspapers, see the pictures and videos, wring our hands and pray.
My wife put together blankets, pillows, food and water.
“Paper says you can leave them at Community Market. They’ll get them to the victims.”
I couldn’t get into the market’s driveway for the long lines of those dropping off their boxes filled with concern and love.
Heard that I could take the items to a union hall – “We hopped to get enough to fill a semi truckload,” the man at the hall said, “but we got that on the first day, we’re sending another.”
So many good people.
And the ash of your homes, towns, of you - we breathe it in taking you into our bodies - you literally become us - streaming through our hearts.
- Armando Garcia-Dávila
Moonless Night, Tomales Bay
bioluminescence – n. the emission of light from living organisms
I set out upon an indigo bay
in evening's spare light,
yellow life jacket and red canoe, frail
against the muscle of dark water.
Pushing past the island
of cormorants and gull,
each stroke ignites ripples; oars
dripping with minute life.
An intimate, star-petaled sky
scatters its glow upon the sea.
Darting fish set a thousand blazes
and the spill of Milky Way
makes horizon meaningless.
Dazzled, I slip
beneath the surface,
the slide of my body against
the tide trails a comet of living light.
I stroke through
shimmering swells,
a second heartbeat.
Lit from inside, my hands open,
reveal the gold coins, passage
to life's unknown edge.
I am not yet ready to spend them,
but if I were, this might be the place,
purified by fire and water.
- Susan Lamont
Fall Comes to Healdsburg
Fall arrives, time’s most favored season—
at last the heart, the mind loosens its fist
so that I no longer need to know who I am
I return to the hills and the great presences—
light, heat, clouds, the bull pines—
to recover for myself the purity of the falling world
to enfold it like a pearl in the mind’s silence
I read the calligraphy of the oaks against
the fading skies, the grass bending in the meadow,
the last robins— I am a circle reaching
the first place for the first time—
in youth among fall leaves I refused
to acknowledge the ancient writing—
that the basket of summer empties, that
the hours of men are as wind-driven clouds—
and yet I stood among fall leaves overjoyed
with the beauty of loss
now I stand on autumn’s wooded knoll
that my life too may vanish
that night may fall into the earth’s arms
time is calling her trout
from their playgrounds in the sea
to river mouth, and redemption, and fury—
for it is by means of the long delay
that we come to the righteousness of passion.
- Lee Perron
September. At the Lake
In early June the lake is new.
Glaciers on the granite rim melt,
rivulets of ice-clouded water gush
down lime-streaked vertical walls.
It is alpine here
with an awareness of snow in every cloud,
even on brilliant blue warm days.
At dawn, wood smoke rises from chimneys.
Campers awake chilled, don sweaters,
brew coffee, greet the morning, wait
for voices rising up along the trail.
Youngsters arrive to scramble over boulders,
climb the cliffs as a test of themselves,
hesitate, then dare the perilous leap.
They fling themselves airward
and the dark lake swallows them in a bellowing splash
until they emerge, gasping.
Throughout the summer, we make the pilgrimage,
yearning to recapture a dream -
these cabins, cold lemonade at the store,
black and white photographs of a time before the road,
a pristine world that once was, everywhere.
The long, endless days stretch toward autumn.
September. The quiet time.
Nothing left to prove, no need to hurry.
The lake is its own slow clock.
It mirrors leaves glowing gold and red.
Trout rise in spreading circles,
aspens shiver dry and sound like
a memory of rain,
jays and squirrels grow plump,
and one last trickle winds its way
from the peak to the lake
playing brook music on the water.
- Elaine Watkins
Autumn
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, are holding up all this falling.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Robert Bly)
Relax
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat–
the one you never really liked–will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up–drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice -one white, one black -scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
- Ellen Bass
The Way It Is
There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
But you don't ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
Eclipse
Hey, the moon doesn't care
and the clouds don't either.
It was just by chance
that the veil lifted
and there she was
small round inscrutable
high away up in the solstice sky.
A different color,
yes, a little rosy like they’d said,
but only a little,
otherwise not so very different
from any other midnight moon.
Then the cloud curtains closed
and I went back inside.
It was tempting to personify,
but I didn't.
It was just by luck the mist drew back,
just by chance
the rains held off,
and when I felt that friendly
though distant moon saying
“Hello, how do I look like this?”
it was just me making it up.
- Julia Bartlett
The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and, finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(translated by Robert Bly)
A Momentary Creed
I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me
it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me
it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me
there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me
the only presence that appears to stay
everything that I call mine it lent me
even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me
- W.S. Merwin
I, Coyote, Stilled Wonder
When did I get this bejawed look,
that flashes up out of creeks and pools?
Was it when I fled across
pasture and through woods,
up to ledge, and came out
in the world to let myself think events
back into their right sequence again?
Man glaring into bloody mess on ground,
cow, who has birthed calf, I,
Coyote, actually tasted,
ate of it well past demarcating line
where calf becomes aftermatter.
I think it was then, when I fled
singing, happy, to wood’s edge.
I could see Man raise arms,
steady his over-and-under, and squeeze.
I, Coyote, I was there, yes I saw it all,
even the flock of tiny lead
that went scattering past.
I felt in me all those that hit,
nearly shattered wraith, clinging
to crushed jawbone, invisibly
slickering through trees, from here on
alone, I, Coyote, stilled wonder.
- Galway Kinnell
Autumn Equinox
Light pregnant with gold develops from
the first glow of red over the horizon,
its shining presence eager to arrive before
the full moon has left the sky.
It is a promise that its decision to leave day by day
will have meaning.
I am held in the stillness of this honeyed presence,
reminded of the exquisite nature of being
in those last moments
before loss becomes certain.
- Jean Norelli
Fig Tree
Offering herself to strangers,
ripe purple ova,
sweet sacks of seeds
soft for the squeezing and tasting--
somebody tell her
not to do that!
Sprawled all over the sidewalk
for any dogwalker to finger,
any old lady, hobbling by on her walker, gets one,
or homeless guy settling in for a smoke,
or surreptitious single mother
with her plastic bags,
her army of climbing kids.
Not very ladylike,
crotch open for a sneakered foot,
a panting embrace,
and all that black honey, oozing.
See how her heart’s left
smashed on the sidewalk
for feral cats to sniff,
her intimate goo underfoot,
pecked by pigeons, swarmed with ants.
Should have pruned her harder,
brought her up short
before she showed her desire so freely
upraised arms opening to sky, profligate
branches that could poke somebody’s eye out:
such crazy need to feed the world.
- Allison Luterman
I love it! An Open Secret about figs! :): Wish the heck I could find some, the only big tree around here is all picked, nothin' on the ground at all! She is one of my favorite poets, but I sent her my work to critique and she was more critical than I'd thought she'd be, ouch! So I haven't read as much of her since the bruised ego, and now this poem of hers about bruised figs, which is DELICIOUS! :heart:
The Word
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between "green thread"
and "broccoli," you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning - to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,
but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
- to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen
- Tony Hoagland
right on, Baby!
Chant
We live to stay
Alive. Prey all, alert
For predators, aware
We will be eaten.
Omnivorous, life eats all,
Grass, sheep,
The upright Sapiens,
Wolf whole.
Ferocious, tenacious life
Hangs in beautiful balance.
Feral child of chance,
Luck and luckless.
The wily mind
Calculates its chances,
The heart drums
Her maniacal mantra:
Alive, alive, alive.
- Rebecca del Rio
Enlightenment
Ten years ago I couldn't stop thinking, feeling,
Just anger, just rage, until this moment.
A crow laughs, the dust clears, I hold the arhat's fruit.
Spotted sunlight in Zhaoyang Palace, a pale face chanting.
- Ikkyu
(translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith)
ON REMAINING NEUTRAL WHILE YOUR FIVE-YEAR-OLD HANDLES A GUN
It takes practice. It must,
to find just the right balance,
the right way to sift, to modulate energy,
attitude, so he won’t walk
back to the car, eyes glued to asphalt,
filled with rapture or
steeped in judgment,
after touching that thing. You want
him to be infused with nothing but sky. The barrel
is propped (mounted, I guess) on the edge
of a Vietnam copter. A boy
in fatigues keeps watch, with a personal
Airsoft lazily tossed beneath the seat
of the vintage machine he’s been left with.
A boy in fatigues. Left with a Vietnam copter.
The gun’s metal is dull, not the sleek shine
your son’s mind was led to expect by the small
doses of gunplay he’s been able to see
in his carefully-crafted home environment.
Softly, softly, he asks, Mom, what’s this?
His small hands lift and lower the gun on
its perch, no sign of bullets, or battle, or death.
A gun, you answer, so cool. His hands flutter
a moment, then return with a question.
It won’t work anymore, you tell him. Again,
so cool. What was it for? For war. Four days
later, up north, one more young man, barely
a man, releases his misplaced white-hot vitriol into the bodies
of students. Your crafted, elusive
equanimity gone, you unloose all your anger
and fear of the gun not in your home (hush!) but on
Facebook. You even piss off your sister-
in-law. The way we can walk with such marked
restraint amidst casual displays of masculine
violence is itself an object of wonder, you think.
And while you lie on your bed, frazzled and knowing
the sweet, twisted, quite normal joy
of kids being kids, while you fervently
wish the NRA could truly be sent
to a hell you know
will never, ever exist, your five-year-old
wanders in. Elbows propped, small hands under chin:
Mom, I really want a dart-gun.
Shit. It takes practice.
- Amy Elizabeth Robinson
Maple Seeds and Squirrels
How amazing it is
that maple seeds spinning their way down
nourish squirrels
and seeds of all sorts birds feed on
to fly on air that supports bats and flying bugs
who do their own feeding dance
and all so obvious and miraculous at once
and all so at once that time can hold and carry us
until we fall away to spin like maple seeds
and the urgency of sperm and egg
mates new us's to continue spinning
down through whispering atmosphere
thick enough to caress with the wings of our souls
thin enough to let us go when time tells us so.
- Tim Hicks
what a wonderful and gloriously run-on sentence ...
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Objector In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoonto ward off complicity—the ordered lifeour leaders have offered us. Thin as a knife,our chance to live depends on such a signwhile others talk and The Pentagon from the moonis bouncing exact commands: "Forget your faith;be ready for whatever it takes to win: we faceannihilation unless all citizens get in line."I bow and cross my fork and spoon: somewhereother citizens more fearfully bowin a place terrorized by their kind of oppressive state.Our signs both mean, "You hostages over therewill never be slaughtered by my act." Our vowscross: never to kill and call it fate. - William Stafford
"...we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is a criminal attitude.
In fact, we have been brainwashed."
— from The Realities of War, by The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Call Away
A cold wind flows over the cornfields;
Fleets of blackbirds ride that ocean.
I want to be out of here, go out,
Outdoors, anywhere in wind.
My back against a shed wall, I settle
Down where no one can find me.
I stare out at the box-elder leaves
Moving frond-like in that mysterious water.
What is it that I want? Not money,
Not a large desk, not a house with ten rooms.
This is what I want to do: to sit here,
To take no part, to be called away by wind.
I want to go the new way, build a shack
With one door, sit against the door frame.
After twenty years, you will see on my face
The same expression you see in the grass.
- Robert Bly
Shadows
Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
Terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
Senseless acts has its thread looping
Back through the world and into a human heart.
And meanwhile
The gold-trimmed thunder
Wanders the sky; the river
May be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.
Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins
Bring us to grief --- but these are the hours
With the old wooden-god faces;
We lift them to our shoulders like so many
Black coffins, we continue walking
Into the future. I don’t mean
There are no bodies in the river,
Or bones broken by the wind. I mean
Everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar
Of the tornado swears there was no mention ever
Of any person, or reason --- I mean
The waters rise without any plot upon
History, or even geography. Whatever
Power of the earth rampages, we turn to it
Dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
The name of the catastrophe, it is never
The opposite of love.
- Mary Oliver
Artificial Tears
We are outliving our eyes
We no longer can cry
In a wicked world politically
uncaring to weep is to act
in some small but at least human
way out or through hopelessness.
Today we watched a dead child
on a foreign beach far from his home
another on a Hungarian railroad track
his father pulling mother and child there
rather than return them to the untenable
and we discovering ourselves to be helpless
are but for this verse individually useless.
- Ed Coletti
Old Friends
Each a mentor
a sherpa
a pathway
a wilderness
Old friends now
elders in gradual
departure into
deeper layers
undiscovered edges
shifting shorelines
a kind of breathing
a sort of threading
in and out
in and out
weaving each other
into living fabric
- Clare Morris
The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and, finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
- Goethe
(translated by Robert Bly)
For Natalie Rogers:
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 might 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
Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.
All is well.
- Henry Scott Holland
This is how I feel about your usually daily offerings, Larry. Too often we wait until we have lost a loved one to speak our appreciation for that loved one's beautiful contributions to our lives. Thank you!
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Decision
There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it —
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
it cannot be after turned back from.
- Jane Hirshfield
Then we will go to Europe
Then we will go to Europe, go
to Venice or Berlin, and live like Rilke
in communes of verse and there,
maybe there, we will shake off this disease
which dulls our senses and dulls everything
and spreads like aluminium
and clings like a plastic bag in a high branch,
like crude to a gannet’s feathers. Or
if not in the cities then in the forests
or in red caves in red deserts
or around the craters of gunungs in the archipelago
or among sandstone towers in the valleys of the West.
Oh ’
I don’t know. Just take me
somewhere it has not yet reached, somewhere
lonely and still real and let me
stand there and feel nothing
and lose the fear and, finally,
breathe.
- Paul Kingsnorth
Doubts and a Hesitation
Even your name
I have doubts about
and about the trees
about their branches, if perhaps
they are roots
and we have been living
all these years underground.
Who has dislocated the world?
and why are birds circling in our stomachs?
Why does a pill defer my birth?
For years we’ve been living underground
and perhaps
on a day in my seventies I’ll be born
and feel that death
is a shirt we all come to put on,
whose buttons we can either fasten
or leave undone…
a man may roll up his sleeves
or he might…
I am
a captive man’s conjectures
about the seasons behind the wall.
- Garous Abdolmalekian
(translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey)
To My Brother Miguel In Memoriam
Brother, today I sit on the brick bench of the house,
where you make a bottomless emptiness.
I remember we used to play at this hour, and mama
caressed us: "But, sons..."
Now I go hide
as before, from all evening
lectures, and I trust you not to give me away.
Through the parlor, the vestibule, the corridors.
Later, you hide, and I do not give you away.
I remember we made ourselves cry,
brother, from so much laughing.
Miguel, you went into hiding
one night in August, toward dawn,
but, instead of chuckling, you were sad.
And the twin heart of those dead evenings
grew annoyed at not finding you. And now
a shadow falls on my soul.
Listen, brother, don't be late
coming out. All right? Mama might worry.
- Cesar Vallejo
Air Mail
On a hunt for a mailbox
I carried the letter through town.
In the great forest of stone and concrete
this lost butterfly fluttered.
The stamp’s flying carpet
the address’s reeling letters
plus my sealed-in truth
now winging over the ocean.
The Atlantic’s crawling silver.
The cloudbanks. The fishing boat
like a spat-out olive pit.
And the wakes’ pale scars.
Down here work goes slowly.
I often sneak peeks at the clock.
The tree-shadows are black figures
in the greedy silence.
The truth is there on the ground
but no one dares to take it.
The truth is out on the street.
No one makes it their own.
- Tomas Transtomer
(Translated by Patty Crane from Swedish)
En Route
This poem is for you who gaze up
from the rooftops
hammers resting in hands,
for the souls that don’t count
stars,
whose glowing faces darken
when they walk away from the computer,
for you who look up at the sun and forget
it, too, is here for a brief moment,
it, too, has not arrived to its final destination.
And should the bright memory of some star
burn through the stratosphere
and catch your gaze as it hurls itself towards
some new land or sea,
your presence - as you are right now -
burns with the same force of God.
You who are alive and not yet arrived.
- Kara Stricker
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner - what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Robert Bly)
More than Once
I have crossed the border by going under the fence,
Crawling through one of its many tears.
This is no news:
People cross this way every day.
For us who lived there it was a game
But for those passing through, it was a life.
Once, I sat on the cement footing,
The fence pulled up enough for me to sit there,
Its wires in my hands, and — in that moment —
I felt the fence as an instrument.
My fingers strummed it, tried to play it
But no music came forth. No song.
The wires were too stiff, with no give.
It would not be a guitar, no mandolin.
It simply made the dull rasp of a fence
Bothered, rough on the fingers,
A little dry,
A little dangerous.
- Alberto Ríos
Mankind’s Colonization Rhyme
Enscripted on the gates of the English colony town of Bandon, Ireland in 1600:
"Entrance to Jew, Turk or Atheist; but Death to Ye Bloody Papists".
At least these English colonists,
Determined Protestants, were rhyming racists.
Now a Papist was a Catholic
And the Irish Catholic were Native Gaelic.
Eire their land was their goddess mother
As it was to their Native American brother.
Both stood in the way of manifest destiny
But their land a jewel in the crown of hegemony,
A jingle in the coffers of the civilized,
Whose greed their deaths contrived.
Who took the land they desired
Because guns made them deserv-ed.
They were the strongest, wisest, fittest;
Morality guides the superior race-ist.
So what better for the vermin,
The uncouth heathens thick with sin,
Than civilization’s icon smack in their eye
To become English or American, better die.
- Brian McSweeney
Ghosts Are Watching Me
These are shell days
Echoes in the ear have names
and what they name is on a list
of things you wanted
What did you want in those
unremarkable days when
what was in your pocket
could buy the world?
Now, every little thing that
was wasted
walks down the street in the
early morning and waits for you
at the bus stop, wanting to
hold your hand
Of course there is weeping
Years later, the letters that
came in the mail
told us this was what
should be expected
And now, in my house,
ghosts are watching me
My plan is to uninvite them
because I am not finished
I never bought anything that
I couldn’t put a spell on
and I still feel dangerous
Sometimes, anyway
So look outside
Night falls and the creepy crawlies
prowl the street, their bodies
made of stars
That’s what I expected
Sometimes, in the company of
such gorgeous maniacs
all I can do is laugh
- Eleanor Lerman
October Corn
The stalks of corn in my vegetable garden a deep green not long ago have given way to a yellowing of old age. Once straight, tall and virile they now bend over like an old man, and my tomato plants are stressed from the cold night air of late October. The green ones will not grow or ripen. It pains me a little seeing the sweetness of summer fade day by day but it’s all a part of the plan you know; the strength of summer giving way to the aching bones of autumn.
In Petaluma parents find themselves meandering through The Corn Maze as their children run through the stalks or climb onto straw bales then choose a pumpkin to take home.
I remember trick or treating one year when my twin, Fernando and I were little boys; Tony, our big brother, dressed us as pirates I got an eye-patch, Fernando a handkerchief tied around his head. Tony made us wooden swords and had me go shirtless into the night. He said that a real pirate would brave the cold and so I refused to shiver and not allow the chill to penetrate beneath my skin. Our older sisters took us house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood in our frenzied drive for as much candy as we could gather; pirates pilfering booty. Only Christmas surpassed Halloween in fun and getting something good for simply being young. So many years later now, I am occupied by the business of grown-ups.
I read in the newspapers that the last of the apples and grapes are being harvested here at home as the wars continue to take their human toll; money squandered that could be used to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and cure the sick. It saddened me to read that Paul Newman had died. They say he was old and sick though I only knew him to be young, handsome and generous. Someone wrote a poem about his life the next day; glad that poets write about things that matter sometimes.
My grandaunt, Tia Sara, who lived in Mexico, died when I was ten. She was very old and very wrinkled. She always wore dark ankle-length dresses and flesh colored stockings that covered what little you could see of her ankles. Her long silver hair was always braided and pinned tightly against her scalp. She went to bed one night never to rise again. Ma’s cousin, my tia Concha washed Sara’s lifeless body, combed and braided her hair, powdered her face, applied rouge, and stuffed wads of newspaper in her mouth to plump up her cheeks, sunken in by death. The family had a traditional “velorio” for Sara. Laid her out in her living room surrounded by candles as everyone knelt and prayed for her soul. My uncles dug her grave and buried her the next day. She received a proper memorial service even if she was a gossip who constantly doled out advice that was not asked for. My ma and pa, tios, tias and some amigos have passed on; irreplaceable losses. Sad that they are not with me at least they visit once in a while in dreams; I take some comfort knowing that one day I will be with them.
And I love the Day of the Dead, a custom rooted in the ancient Mexico. A way to honor those who have passed to the other world; a way to accept and even poke fun at, instead of fearing death. I suppose that by doing this we prepare ourselves for our own inevitable engagement with him.
We can fear or laugh and even accept him, for in the end we have no choice in the matter; it is all a part of the plan; are we not like stalks of corn in a garden? small tender sprouts in spring, strong and sturdy in summer, frail in autumn, dried and lifeless in winter.
Let us be like the sketches of skeletons who play music, dance and sing; hence replacing fear with a fiesta. Let us celebrate then, for today we are on this side of the great divide honoring those who have passed to the other hoping that one day we will be remembered and respected in the same manner even if we are imperfect. Raise your cups of atole of chocolate caliente raise your pan dulce: here’s to life mis hermanos y hermanas, here’s to death.
- Armando Garcia-Dávila
All Souls
Cougnac Cave, France
Many corners turned beneath
pencil-thin stalactites, thousands
like upside down candles,
wet flames dripping.
Beyond my mind's
violence, there,
an ibex painted
in stalactite-milk
with wall-ooze for
a shaggy coat. Will it always
be buried? Memory
stumbling into mineral stillness.
crystallized, almost lucid, or carried -
a forgotten animal across
my shoulders, radiant
and awash in lactation, made
with hand, mouth, spit.
Dear friend, I remember
being painted
in coal and blood,
and the long gallery
where all souls parade.
- Ann Marie Macari
Biniam Habte, a 20-year-old Eritrean, who had crossed the Sahara in his quest to reach Europe, told a British newspaper reporter in Calais: “On the journey I have made, you carry your life like an egg in your hand.”
Carry Your Life
What does it mean to carry your life
A thing so fragile, so vital
It might burst from your careful
Ministrations and escape to an
Unseen fate?
Do we know that we
Carry our lives or must
Our existence be threatened
For us to awaken to our
Precious, quixotic nature?
A gift, this animated body
Everyday it does the soul's
Labor, the heart's will,
Stirred by a curious
Mind—active and demanding.
Within the body's kind surrender,
We labor, live our illusions
Ask for more, insist.
Unaware or unwilling, we ignore
The delicate light we carry inside.
And in our ignorance,
A hardening begins—
Against our own vulnerability
The vulnerability of all our
Kind. Together we awaken
See ourselves in others, ask how
Do we carry the defenseless eggs
Of others as they cross
Our lives? How will we allow
Ourselves to be carried?
- Rebecca del Rio
The Poets Hang On
The poets hang on.
It’s hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it’s been tried.
We pass them on the road
standing there with their begging bowls,
an ancient custom.
Nothing in those now
but dried flies and bad pennies.
They stare straight ahead.
Are they dead, or what?
Yet they have the irritating look
of those who know more than we do.
More of what?
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
If you try for a simple answer,
that’s when they pretend to be crazy,
or else drunk, or else poor.
They put those costumes on
some time ago,
those black sweaters, those tatters;
now they can’t get them off.
And they’re having trouble with their teeth.
That’s one of their burdens.
They could use some dental work.
They’re having trouble with their wings, as well.
We’re not getting much from them
in the flight department these days.
No more soaring, no radiance,
no skylarking.
What the hell are they paid for?
(Suppose they are paid.)
They can’t get off the ground,
them and their muddy feathers.
If they fly, it’s downwards,
into the damp grey earth.
Go away, we say -
and take your boring sadness.
You’re not wanted here.
You’ve forgotten how to tell us
how sublime we are.
How love is the answer:
we always liked that one.
You’ve forgotten how to kiss up.
You’re not wise any more.
You’ve lost your splendor.
But the poets hang on.
They’re nothing if not tenacious.
They can’t sing, they can’t fly.
They only hop and croak
and bash themselves against the air
as if in cages,
and tell the odd tired joke.
When asked about it, they say
they speak what they must.
Cripes, they’re pretentious.
They know something, though.
They do know something.
Something they’re whispering,
something we can’t quite hear.
Is it about sex?
Is it about dust?
Is it about love?
- Margaret Atwood
From “Letters to my Probable Selves”
The letter in my unsent email file
Begun a year ago. Before.
Revisited now. After.
Questions we have been asking for fifty years:
What if. When. Who. Which one of us first. How.
So many poems dealing with loss.
With death. The sudden losses.
The long, drawn out ones.
The sense of how fragile our lives are.
“Fragility.” Probably the most important piece in my book,
but balanced by “Clarity.” The two flanks.
Libra, holding her own.
The losses keep adding up. At the heart of it all,
Adrianne. Loss of a poet. Loss of a friend.
My sense of her continued presence is deep.
She understood my love for Madge.
And I understood her passion for poetry.
For William. For Eve. For her dogs.
For her last wolfdog, Lady Macbeth.
You told me you have been sick.
Are you well now? I don't know.
So much I don't know.
What I do know:
Madge thinks only of me now,
Of how I will cope after her death.
”This isn’t the way we planned it, is it?” she said.
“No” I answered.
How does anyone know. The when.
The how.
I have this sense that it is okay to send you
what I am thinking.
Feeling. But is it?
I don’t really know.
- fran claggett
Ten Questions For The New Age
Why does someone who takes the name Buffalo Vision, for example,
after his weekend ayahuasca workshop
always seem to have an unwarranted confidence
that he is going to end up at the Happy Hunting Ground?
If Eagle Mountain marries Western River Woman - fine.
But why do they have to name their daughter Blueberry, or Lake?
Then they send her to suffer at a Waldorf school
where she majors in birch bark and folk dance
and years later has to hire a life coach to help her fill out college applications,
as she painstakingly writes an autobiographical essay
on the theme of how certain so-called sentient beings
can inflict their embarrassing illusions upon another.
Do you get what I'm talking about?
About the follies of playing at innocence?
Walt Disney made some good movies,
but would you really get ten aphoristic sayings from The Lion King
tattooed on your forearm for practical reference
as you ship out to Iraq?
Which brings me to my actual subject, a man I will call Steve,
whom I met at a rest stop right after his second vision quest;
who wore a feather in his hat, was fifty-five, well-fed,
and lived with his mom in Carson City; who
plays his guitar at open mikes and plans on a serious musical career
as soon as he gets more experience.
Steve, who prefers to be called by his true name, Iron Bear.
Whenever I encounter the New Age still in its original diapers,
I confess that I blush down to my deepest roots,
for I, too, am its scornful, not entirely grown-up child.
When I was twenty, I learned to play "Blowin' in the Wind" on a wooden flute;
I made bracelets out of wire and polished quartz and gave them away.
I had a girlfriend who freely expressed her opinion
that people born in Bangladesh had probably incarnated there
to work out their issues with poverty.
Why does the New Age seem so often like a patient in intensive care,
in a delicate condition, requiring giant infusions of illusion
and charity to stay alive,
while the rest of us keep waiting for the day it might get tough enough
to be successfully transplanted into the real world?
Getting back to Steve, still living with his mom, on an allowance, in Carson City:
Nothing can stop him
from going to the open mike every Thursday night and singing his heart out,
or from signing his letter Blessings, from Iron Bear, Poet and Seer, aka Steve.
Pretend for a moment that you are a philanthropist whom I am
asking for a donation to a charitable program
to rehabilitate wandering middle-aged children like the ones I am describing.
What funds can you offer? What advice would you have for me?
What chance do think there is for Steve to ever grow up,
much less find a happy ending?
On the other hand, isn't it some kind of ultimate foolishness
to scold cheerful people who in their way are the pilgrims of our time
about the folly of their happiness?
What kind of folly is that?
- Tony Hoagland
We Are A River
Our life has not been an ascent
up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.
*
Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.
- Lao Tzu
(translation by William Martin)
And their work informs our souls.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
You sure do find some insight-ful stuff, Larry. And relating this poem to another discussion on Wacco bb; Do we think Steve should be housed in a tiny house, or a shelter? It brings to mind the dilemma that a family had this week whose son/brother died from exposure/or other, in downtown Santa Rosa having refused their offer to have him come home. These are important discussions which we avoid because of the dilemmas they present and our unwillingness or inability to act.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Describe Your Grief
I am driving a back road
where there are still farms,
fenced cattle, tobacco barns.
I can’t describe my grief,
unless it’s like marching
into a lost war, folding clothes by numbers,
waiting in rank for breakfast
beneath the steamy electric lights
before dawn, crawling in a cave
that hasn’t been mapped.
I round a curve and see two birds
flapping in the road.
One has been hit
by a car, and its mate
flutters just above,
wild to inspire
its fallen partner’s flight.
When Anna was ill,
I would have seen her as the fallen bird,
injured in the road, as I hovered,
watching her struggles,
urging her to fly on broken wings.
But now she is gone,
with our marathon conversations,
her startling questions.
And I don’t know
which of those two birds
I am.
- Tom Hawkins
Tracking at Auschwitz
Went tracking at Auschwitz,
looking for animal signs-
tracks, scat, anything.
There was plenty of human spoor but
the only life I saw
was a raptor
perch hunting
from a
bent steel post
of a once electrified
barbed wire
fence.
- George Gittleman
Tornadoes
Not all tornadoes
rip--ravage wide swaths
across grasslands, the flat prairies
nor deep into the wet pungent air
of old plantation country.
No! No Joplin nor Tuscaloosa, here.
These drop,
bomb-like
from the
turbulent
skies of
my mind,
dip down
randomly
here and
there and
lay waste
to all I
have
made
for my
self
over
the
years—
those sturdy structures, carefully placed,
laboriously raised across the landscape of my soul—
my sanctuaries, my havens—
the places where I go to know
the peace of self acceptance.
Gone, now!
And when those turbulent skies have cleared,
I stand amidst the ruin and the rubble
and I look up and I find distant points of light
that tell me where I am
and I know, then,
I will build again
a place for myself.
- Bill Denham
Falling Horse
Ochre, and the black line
of mane painted soft on the wall, legs
pointing up. Who knows how
to fall without landing, to pass through
each dimension upside down? Forgotten,
the upper world and all that light.
Why do you haunt me?
For a little while I want to be alone
with the animals, with the cold stone
and my lamp. The black mane
caresses the horse's head,
floating between us.
- Ann Marin Macari
Before Dark
They used to mass
in the crowns of oaks
on every street for blocks around
but have gone elsewhere,
the evening no longer
gathered by their feathers
but by the leaves, which blot
whatever light is left to the sky.
Whether we saw the crows
as a barely worth mentioning
image of death for the way
they took over branches
with perfect authority,
whether, where did I hear it, their
numbers were thinned by disease,
nothing avails. They are
missing, the crackle of wings
against the weight of their flight,
beaks that broke open
broadcasting any scrap of news.
Like our children, they carry off
whole years, like the wind-borne thought
of cries never welcome enough
day or night in our ears.
- Jennifer Barber
Felix Crow
Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.
- Kay Ryan
Any News
The black bird on the bent tower
where the windmill used to turn
on that deserted farm in Illinois
is still waiting in the falling rain
for any news, any sign
that tomorrow
might be better.
- Doug von Koss
Fall Song
It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for ‘‘divine’’?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.
- Joy Harjo
Clearing
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing
in the dense forest of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.
- Martha Postlewaite
Proclamation
Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.
Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;
Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free - despite all
fire and anger and fear;
Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling - a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.
- Kim Stafford
Rise and Fall - Larry Robinson
Rise and Fall
Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.
Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.
Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.
Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.
Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.
Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.
Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.
- Larry Robinson
perfect.
Oooh, great one, Larry!
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Song
There are those who are trying to set fire to the world,
we are in danger,
there is time only to work slowly,
there is no time not to love.
- Deena Metzger
To Those Who Have Lost Everything
crossed
in despair
many deserts
full of hope
carrying
their empty
fists of sorrow
everywhere
mouthing
a bitter night
of shovels
and nails
“you’re nothing
you’re shit
your home’s
nowhere”—
mountains
will speak
for you
rain
will flesh
your bones
green again
among ashes
after a long fire
started in
a fantasy island
some time ago
turning
Natives
into aliens
- Francisco X. Alarcón
Every Revolution Needs Fresh Poems
Every revolution needs fresh poems
that is the reason
poetry cannot die.
It is the reason poets
go without sleep
and sometimes without lovers
without new cars
and without fine clothes
the reason we commit
to facing the dark
and
resign ourselves, regularly, to the possibility
of being wrong.
Poetry is leading us.
It never cares how we will
be held by lovers
or drive fast
or look good
in the moment;
but about how completely
we are committed
to movement
both inner and outer;
and devoted to transformation
and to change.
- Alice Walker
The Ripening
This Living
has softened the hard fruit
of my being
Everyday, tenderness
claims more of me
taking me holy
into ripeness
Let me not
fall from the branch
ripe but untasted
Rather, let the Beloved
pluck me in ripeness
and pierce me with His bite
Releasing the juicy
fullness of my life
to run down His arm
like tears of gratitude,
like tears of devotion
But,
if fall I must
untasted
melting into the earth
Let that nourishing decay
be my devotion
spreading out in a pool
of returning
the essential elements
of my being
- Kay Crista
Africa revisited
Tell me about your trip to Africa, the liv ely wild creatures inhabiting that continent.
Remind me again of how they appeared to you.
Just another day in the life for them, A small miracle for you.
You hike dusty African hills with no guarantee that you will be invited in, to observe their world.
Will you be welcomed to a dappled glimpse of fur and chiseled teeth?
Alone at night, will you be somewhat disturbed by distant roaring base sounds heard instead of words?
A profound gift of savannah life is handed to you, on an earth l y platter.
Your easy presence is considered in a flash then filed away, as
neither predator nor prey, just a heart beat in the distance.
Tell me again about your trip to Africa, deep jungle's roar at night, hyena's fulsome laughter carried on slight wind.
Remind me once again of how the unbidden occurs whether we allow it or not,
Remind me too of the ways grace rains down on each of us lively wild creatures, uninvited and ever-present.
- Ann Krinard
To My Favorite Seventeen Year-Old High School Girl
Do you realize that if you had started
building the Parthenon, on the day you were born
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that alone,
so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.
You’re a love for simply being yourself.
But did you know that, at your age Judy Garland
was pulling down $150,000 per picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,
and Blase Pascal had cleaned up his room?
No, wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life
after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom, or, at least, pick up all your socks.
For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey
was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,
but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,
four operas, and two complete masses as a youngster.
But of course that was in Austria at the height
of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you are special by just being you,
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.
- Billy Collins
Prayer For The Great Family
Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.
Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through the wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
in our mind so be it.
Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it.
Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave, and aware
in our minds so be it.
Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it.
Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep—he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it.
Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars—and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.
so be it.
- Gray Snyder
Blessing The Bones
I sit alone at the kitchen table,
barbecued chicken bones lie heaped
like dead soldiers on my plate.
I lick the sauce from the bones.
I feel carnal and content
and then I think of grandma.
I could be her as I enjoy
this solitary meal.
She is dressed in a long straight skirt,
a short-sleeved cotton blouse.
Her apron is spotted, her stockings
sag down around her ankles, her toes
poke through worn slippers.
I watch her soak crusts of bread
in pan drippings, take her fork and balance
bits of lamb and potatoes on top.
She always ate last, but best of all.
I think of her long, un-mothered life -
just twelve when she boarded
the boat to Ellis Island, a child
sent alone by her family to seek a better life.
She was not blue-blood, never lost
her accent or peasant ways,
heard American neighbors call her
immigrant or less.
I think of her homeland under seige.
I could be dying there now,
our home downed by mortar shells.
I could be eating rationed bread,
the only bones those of slaughtered sons.
I could be cleaning a daughter's ravaged flesh.
I want to cry out to grandma,
cry out so the heavens will open
and angels bring her closer.
I want to hold her, smell her skin,
bury my head in her feeble shoulders,
run my fingers through her white hair,
kiss away her sadness.
I want to cover her table
with a white Damask cloth,
set out a feast, exchange
her black babooshka for the
milliner's finest red felt hat.
I want to thank her for my life,
say that I understand her sacrifice.
I want to bless her bones.
- Jackie Huss Hallerberg
Gratitude
What did you notice?
The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;
the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.
What did you hear?
The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
then the deep cup of the hour of silence.
What did you admire?
The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;
the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;
the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the
pale green wand;
at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid
beauty of the flowers;
then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.
What astonished you?
The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.
What would you like to see again?
My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,
her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue, her
recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her
sturdy legs, her curled black lip, her snap.
What was most tender?
Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;
the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;
the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;
the tall, blank banks of sand;
the clam, clamped down.
What was most wonderful?
The sea, and its wide shoulders;
the sea and its triangles;
the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.
What did you think was happening?
The green breast of the hummingbird;
the eye of the pond;
the wet face of the lily;
the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;
the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;
the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve
of the first snow—
so the gods shake us from our sleep.
- Mary Oliver
Family Reunion
The week in August you come home,
adult, professional, aloof,
we roast and carve the fatted calf
—in our case homegrown pig, the chine
garlicked and crisped, the applesauce
hand-pressed. Handpressed with greengage wine.
Nothing is cost effective here.
The peas, the beets, the lettuces
handsown, are raised to stand apart.
The electric fence ticks like the slow heart
of something we fed and bedded for a year,
then killed with kindness’s one bullet
and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering.
In winter we lure the birds with suet,
thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat.
Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring
of wire that keeps raccoons from the corn
to the gouged pine table that we lounge around,
distressed before any of you was born.
Benign and dozy from our gluttonies,
the candles down to stubs, defenses down,
love leaking out unguarded the way
juice dribbles from the fence when grounded
by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe,
how eloquent, how beautiful you seem!
Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,
ballooning to overfill our space,
the almost-parents of your parents now.
So briefly having you back to measure us
is harder than having let you go.
- Maxine Kumin
They've lost it, lost it,
and their children
will never even wish for it-
and I am afraid
that the whole tribe's in trouble,
the whole tribe is lost-
because the sun keeps rising
and these days
nobody sings
- Aaron Kramer
Love Calls Us to the Things of the World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."
- Richard Wilbur
Listening to the Koln Concert
After we had loved each other intently,
we heard notes tumbling together,
in late winter, and we heard ice
falling from the ends of twigs.
The notes abandon so much as they move.
They are the food not eaten, the comfort
not taken, the lies not spoken.
The music is my attention to you.
And when the music came again,
later in the day, I saw tears in you r eyes.
I saw you turn your face away
so that the others would not see.
When men and women come together,
how much they have to abandon! Wrens
make their nests of fancy threads
and string ends, animals
abandon all their money each year.
What is that men and women leave?
Harder then wrens' doing, they have
to abandon their longing for the perfect.
The inner nest not made by instinct
will never be quite round,
and each has to enter the nest
made by the other imperfect bird.
- Robert Bly
Love After Love
The day will come when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say,
sit here, eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine, give bread.
Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
- Derek Walcott
This Making of a Whole Self
This making of a whole self takes
such a very long time: pieces are not
sequential nor our supplies. We work here,
then there, hold up tattered fabric to the light.
Sew past dark, intent. Use all our thread.
Sleeves may come before length;
buttons, before a rounded neck.
We sew at what most needs us,
and as it asks, sew again.
The self is not one thing, once made,
unaltered. Not midnight task alone, not
after other work. It’s everything we come
upon, make ours: all this fitting of
what-once-was and has-become.
- Nancy Shaffer
Fog Drip
Fog drip, they say,
replenishes the aquifer.
Redwood needles pull
moisture from the mist,
guiding it down to the roots -
and below.
Even in the driest years
these patient old ones
remain ever green.
Some elders are like that.
They find the goodness there is
and draw it down,
sustaining themselves
while feeding the deeper stream.
They don’t demand attention;
they don’t seek profit or approval.
Usually they don’t even know
they are doing this.
Do the redwoods know - or care -
where the water goes?
Francis of Assisi called down grace
by the simple act of gratitude.
The foxes and the sparrows
drank deeply from his fog drip.
- Larry Robinson
A Thank You Message Written for her Family at Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving, my beloved family.
As this time of year rolls around and we look at what we're thankful for,
I'd have to say that what I'm most grateful for is my family.
We are all here because we are the descendants of something greater than our own lives,
and that is our family's lineage.
We hold our place in a sequence of lives,
a lineage of people who knew pain and joy, hope and despair,
who were capable of greatness and generosity, as well as pettiness and spite.
You are the next generations.
You hold the key to the future and the link to memory.
You are the living legacy of all the ancestors who have gone before you.
Although much of our history and its players remain unknown to us,
never forget that there is an invisible line of men and women who
stand behind each of you and stretches back through time, farther than we can see.
This moment is the culmination of every thought, action, feeling and
circumstance of all of their lives added to all of your grandparents' lives,
your parents' lives and now your lives.
In this season of gratitude and remembering, I ask you to take a moment
to consider your place in this lineage, to imagine what the faces must look like
that stand silently behind you, to consider what their dreams may have been and
how you are the answer to their prayers.
Then look forward, to the children who come after you, to their children and beyond.
What would you like to leave as a legacy for them?
What prayers beat in your heart for them?
For my part, I know that you are the living answers to my prayers.
On behalf of all of your ancestors may I say, Thank you for choosing us.
- Diana Del Drago
Holiday Poem
Everyone wants a piece of you.
Even the elderly oaks, their
branches draped with lichen
lace, are reaching long
limbs towards your body
as you pass.
The demands are ceaseless,
it seems. The ways to say
yes, change direction,
possibly crumble. Still,
you let the branches brush you.
Until you hear the rushing
of the downhill stream,
the wide green hand of the
mountain letting go, letting forth.
It asks nothing.
You lean into,
you follow
that sound.
- Amy Elizabeth Robinson
Meeting The Light Completely
Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.
Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.
A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.
Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.
And then
what is said by all lovers:
"What fools we were, not to have seen."
- Jane Hirshfield
December 7th Prayer
Like a distressed baby,
crying in an empty room,
I used to pray.
Now I just wait expectantly
till clarity comes,
often vexing me greatly
with what it has to say,
as if daring me to stare at the sun.
Or, slowly cooking a thick slab of puzzlement,
avoiding all recipes’ tedium,
I keep turning and turning
till I get a well-seared response
to a question that refuses to leave.
Sometimes I’m like a clumsy country doctor,
vainly trying to pin down a persistent pain’s true cause,
poking and prodding,
ineptly seeking to know what’s up,
only to find that what’s not up
is what I ought to seek.
Amazed that the head on collision of one sperm and one egg,
in the fierce run up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
led to the odd duck who bears my name,
I am lately bemused by the wondrous strangeness of it all,
and regret, ever so slightly, that no one can hear me when,
my solitary heart wishing that it were not so,
I yearn to say, “Thanks for all this blessing.”
- Bill Dickinson
Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper
The front page reports
120 soldiers were killed
the war was long
you get used to it
right next to this news
of a spectacular crime
with the killer’s photo
Mr. Cogito’s gaze
moves with indifference
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with great relish
into the quotidian macabre
a thirty-year-old farmworker
in a state of manic depression
murdered his own wife
and two small children
we are told the exact
way they were killed
the position of the bodies
and the other details
it’s no use trying to find
120 lost men on a map
a distance too remote
hides them like a jungle
they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero on the end
turns them into an abstraction
a theme for further reflection:
the arithmetic of compassion.
- Zbigniew Herbert
Lost in thought
I want to get lost in those thoughts
that continue expanding
way out over the clouds
rising into nests of stars
migrating across seas, flying
into wild new geographies of meaning.
I want to get carried away
from all that is manageable and trivial,
all that is self-defeating
all that shrivels the heart
binds the feet and shrink wraps a soul.
I want to get lost with those spacious thoughts
that amaze, like stories,
building syllable upon syllable,
word after word, until, in the end,
the plot gives way
to holy incomprehension,
I want to say yes to all
that bids us to the window
and across the door step
where rustling satin notes of sky
sing us into whole landscapes
of yet unspoken poetry.
- Judith Stone
There Is No Going Back
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
- Wendell Berry
Races
You are a Brother
And a Sister
In the colors of Life
Some people believe
They are races
Human races
Whatever that may be
Races are for running
The competitive edge
Distrust and confusion
Leaving alterations
In innocent faces
We are natural Life
A part of Mother Earth's design
A blending of colorsTo make the difference
In the teaching
of meanings
We are colors in the family
of Life.
- John Trudell
(February 15, 1946 – December 8, 2015)
Thanks For Remembering Us
The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they're not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.
The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can't
throw out a gift we've never owned.
- Dana Gioia