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Gold, Green
Let it be
On a day in March
California;
When the grass is green
On the rolling hills
And the snow
Is deep in the mountains –
Let it be
On a day like this
That we plant a tree
California
For the years to come
For the little ones
and the lakes
Will be pure in the mountains –
Let it be gold and green
California;
That we touch the ground
That we heal the land
From the mountains to the sea.
- Gary Snyder
Envoi
O, child, where we stand
Is quicksand
This venerable crust
Dust
Move bravely on,
As if there were watchers.
- Barry Spacks
alchemy
the miracle is in
the capacity
of your eyes
to distinguish
an ordinary tree
from a sun-crowned
gently nodding
green cathedral.
to realize
a faucet
is a dispensary
of wet
braided
light.
to regard
your own
left hand
as an astonishing feat
of animation.
to turn
a rabid
gnashing world
into unending
gentle music.
- Natascha Bruckner
Daffodils
I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
- William Wordsworth
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form a Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords or ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
- William Butler Yeats
A Song Of Peace
I closed my eyes in darkness
and opened them in light,
and over the world,
like a flag unfurled,
was a sweet sound and a holy sight.
A dove spread wings of magic;
its shadow was golden and broad,
and the people of earth,
in a passion of birth,
had shattered an ancient sword.
Oh, why is my country hated
and made such a thing of scorn,
this fruitful place
with its varied race,
this land where I was born?
And why is my country darkened,
when the rest of the world is light,
and cloaked in fear
of things once dear,
and weak in its frightful might?
And why are the people silent,
and where is the ancient song
that mankind found
was freedom's sound,
to shatter injustice and wrong?
We'll not have our country hated!
Our country is strong and grand.
Oh, be not dismayed
by those who betrayed
the heritage of our land.
If a song can be made so simple,
if a word can become a creed,
then the sound of peace
will gently increase,
like the harvest from the seed.
Ask not why the land is silent;
let the people measure their toil,
and the human race
will share its grace
with the lonely folk of our soil.
Its grace is new and holy,
and peace is the dream of the world,
and the people of earth
in a passion of birth
will see their banner unfurled.
The banner is pure and sacred,
enough of the swine who destroy!
Enough of the night,
the world is bright-
and the future is filled with-joy.
Our cup is running over
with the graft and the lies and the hate,
and the renegade
is too well paid
with our broken dreams and our children's fate.
We'll open our eyes in the darkness,
and boldly look to the light,
and call to our side
with earnest pride
our people who dwell in the night.
And they'll see the dove so holy,
so pure and wide of wing,
wide as the earth
in its passion of birth-
with a joyful song to sing.
And the lilt will be made so simple,
and the word will become a creed,
and the song of peace
will gently increase,
like the harvest from the seed.
- Howard Fast (1914-2003)
Another Spring
The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.
The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.
The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Northern Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.
O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever
Slide unconsciously by us like water.
- Kenneth Rexroth
Ten Years Later
When the mind is clear
and the surface of the now still,
now swaying water
slaps against
the rolling kayak,
I find myself near darkness,
paddling again to Yellow Island.
Every spring wildflowers
cover the grey rocks.
Every year the sea breeze
ruffles the cold and lovely pearls
hidden in the center of the flowers
as if remembering them
by touch alone.
A calm and lonely, trembling beauty
that frightened me in youth.
Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I've learned these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.
Innocence is what we allow
to be gifted back to us
once we've given ourselves away.
There is one world only,
the one to which we gave ourselves
utterly, and to which one day
we are blessed to return.
- David Whyte
Frivolous Spring
If one must have a mind for winter,
spring requires no mind at all.
Only a blue-eyed sky, long of day,
sweet of night,
or sprinkle of rain with muddysplash
walk in the park,
and gather of lupine, poppies,
a singing lark.
Spring is a garland dance in the woods,
a humming breeze with peppery zing
of pollensting,
a giddy of daisies flinging petals
to the wind, counting the ways
helovesmehelovesmenothelovesme!
- Patrice Warrender
Bush's War
I typed the brief phrase, "Bush's War,"
At the top of a sheet of white paper,
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at hand,
Set the facts out in an orderly way.
Berlin is a northerly city. In May
At the end of the twentieth century
In the leafy precincts of Dahlem Dorf,
South of the Grunewald, near Krumme Lanke,
Spring is northerly; it begins before dawn
In a racket of bird song. The amsels
Shiver the sun up as if they were shaking
A liquid tangle of golden wire. There are two kinds
Of flowering chestnuts, red and white,
And the wet pavements are speckled
With petals from the incandescent spikes
Of their flowers and shoes at U-bahn stops
Are flecked with them. Green of holm oaks,
Birch tassels, the soft green of maples,
And the odor of lilacs is everywhere.
At Oscar Helene Heim station a farmer
Sells white asparagus from a heaped table.
In a month he'll be selling chanterelles;
In the month after that, strawberries
And small, rosy crawfish from the Spree.
The piles of stalks of the asparagus
Are startlingly phallic, phallic and tender
And deathly pale. Their seasonal appearance
Must be the remnant of some fertility ritual
Of the German tribes. Steamed, they are the color
Of old ivory. In May, in restaurants
They are served on heaped white platters
With boiled potatoes and parsley butter,
Or shavings of Parma ham and lemon juice
Or sorrel and smoked salmon. And,
Walking home in the slant, widening,
Brilliant northern light that falls
On the new-leaved birches and the elms,
Nightingales singing at the first, subtlest,
Darkening of dusk, it is a trick of the mind
That the past seems just ahead of us,
As if we were being shunted there
In the surge of a rattling funicular.
Flash forward: the firebombing of Hamburg,
Fifty thousand dead in a single night,
"The children's bodies the next day
Set in the street in rows like a market
In charred chicken." Flash forward:
Firebombing of Tokyo, a hundred thousand
In a night. Flash forward: forty-five
Thousand Polish officers slaughtered
By the Russian Army in the Katyn Woods,
The work of half a day. Flash forward:
Two million Russian prisoners of war
Murdered by the German army all across
The eastern front, supplies low,
Winter of 1943. Flash: Hiroshima.
And then Nagasaki, as if the sentence
Life is fire and flesh is ash needed
To be spoken twice. Flash: Auschwitz,
Dachau, Therienstadt, the train lurching,
The stomach woozy, past displays of falls
Of hair, piles of valises, spectacles
With frames designed to curl delicately
Around a human ear. Flash:
The gulags, seven million in Byelorussia
And Ukraine. In innocent Europe on a night
In spring, among the light-struck birches,
Students holding hands. One of them
Is carrying a novel, the German translation
Of a slim book by Marguerite Duras
About a love affair in old Saigon. (Flash:
Two million Vietnamese, fifty five thousand
Of the American young, whole races
Of tropical birds extinct from saturation bombing)
The kind of book the young love
To love, about love in time of war.
Forty five million, all told, in World War II.
In Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the spring time,
You are never not wondering how
It happened, and the people around you
In the station with chestnut petals on their shoes,
Children then, or unborn, never not
Wondering. Is it that we like the kissing
And bombing together, in prospect
At least, girls in their flowery dresses?
Someone will always want to mobilize
Death on a massive scale for economic
Domination or revenge. And the task, taken
As a task, appeals to the imagination.
The military is an engineering profession.
Look at boys playing: they love
To figure out the ways to blow things up.
But the rest of us have to go along.
Why do we do it? Certainly there's a rage
To injure what's injured us. Wars
Are always pitched to us that way.
The well-paid news readers read the reasons
On the air. And we who are injured,
Or have been convinced that we are injured,
Are always identified with virtue. It's that--
The rage to hurt mixed with self-righteousness
And fear--that's murderous.
The young Arab depilated himself
As an act of purification before he drove
The plane into the office building. It's not
Just violence, it's a taste for power
That amounts to loathing for the body.
Perhaps it's this that permits people to believe
That the dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the glimpse afforded them before they died
Of the raw white of the splintered bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of their injured killers.
It's hard to say which is worse about this,
The moral sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.
And what good are our judgments to the dead?
And death the cleanser, Walt Whitman's
Sweet death, the scourer, the tender
Lover, shutter of eyelids, turns
The heaped bodies into summer fruit,
Magpies eating dark berries in the dusk
And birch pollen staining sidewalks
To the faintest gold. Bald nur--Goethe--no,
Warte nur, bald ruhest du auch. Just wait.
You will be quiet soon enough. In Dahlem,
Under the chestnuts, in the leafy spring.
- Robert Hass
Leah's Daughter
The workshop was just about to get started when somebody noticed
that Leah looked glum & distracted & asked what was wrong,
& Leah told us her daughter had called from Iraq that morning,
hysterical, screaming & weeping. Trained as an army clerk,
she'd been reassigned & was driving sniper patrols around
in a Humvee. The day before, they'd spied two guys
at the side of the road wiring an IED, & behind them, sitting
& playing, were two little kids. Leah said her daughter
kept screaming into the phone that her guys fired round after round
after round till the four were nothing but torn-open bodies
& skulls without faces in puddles of blood & her guys just kept
laughing & shooting & laughing & shooting & "Mom, they
were just little kids! Oh my God," she kept crying. "It's not right!
It just isn't right!" We sat there, all of us, horrified, silent.
Till finally Karen said, "That's awful, Leah!" & after a minute or two,
when no one said anything more, I started taking attendance.
Then we critiqued the first poem: an honest if somewhat
disorganized story of failed love. But of course it was still
on everyone's mind, & someone, I think it was Teri, asked Leah
how old her daughter was & how long before she'd
get to come home. "It's her second deploy," Leah said quietly.
"She'll be twenty in August. She's got four months & six days
to go if her tour isn't extended like last time & if . . . " She stopped
midsentence. No one said anything further. Like everyone
else, I kept my mouth shut, & we moved on to the next poem.
- Steve Kowit
Is this a poem, a prayer, or a list.
Are these arbitrary things. Mercury,
Venus, Earth. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune. Eight. Like spokes
on the wheel of dharma. Nights
of hanukkah, lenses in a fission
weapon. Eight the atomic
number of oxygen. China
knew eight immortals, the Buddha
once preached an eightfold path.
Count the stars, you ask.
No. No, I can't. The gyroscope
of planets, what comes first. Count
the atomic number of hydrogen. How
many oceans are there really.
How many voids comprise the hub
of the dharmachakra, how many plutonium
cores inside the bomb. The one
whose initial impact my grandfather
miscalculated. What is not a planet. Why
do stars contain lithium, die
white dwarfs, in need of lithium.
- Zach Horvitz
Honda Pavarotti
I'm driving on the dark highway
when the opera singer on the radio
opens his great mouth
and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.
So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs
as I steer through the galleries
of one dilated Italian syllable
after another. I love the passages in which
the rich flood of the baritone
strains out against the walls of the esophagus,
and I love the pauses
in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale
enough oxygen to take the next plummet
up into the chasm of the violins.
In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer
is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs
while his head and legs keep kicking.
In part of the song, it sounds as if he is
standing in the middle of a coliseum,
swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,
the empire of gravity
conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,
the citadel of pride in flames
and the citizens of weakness
celebrating their defeat in chorus,
joy and suffering made one at last,
joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,
though I know the woman he is singing for
is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,
though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic
and his mismanagement of money is legendary,
as I know I have squandered
most of my own life
in a haze of trivial distractions,
and that I will continue to waste it.
But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,
because no place I could arrive at
is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience
but to which experience will never measure up.
And that dark and soaring fact
is enough to make me renounce the whole world
or fall in love with it forever.
- Tony Hoagland
Spring
Again, the violet bows to the lily
Again the rose is tearing off her gown!
Again, near the top of the mountain
The anemone’s sweet features appear.
The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine,
“Peace be with you.” “And peace to you lad!
Come walk with me in this meadow.”
The narcissus winks at the wisteria,
“Whenever you say.”
And the clove to the willow, “You are the one
I hope for.” The willow replies, “Consider
these chambers of mine yours. Welcome!”
The ringdove comes asking, “Where,
where is the Friend?”
With one note the nightingale
Indicates the rose.
Again, the season of Spring has come
And a spring-source rises under everything,
a moon sliding from the shadows.
- Jelaluddin Rumi
( translated by Coleman Barks)
To These Eyes
You only ones
I ever knew
you that have shown me
what I came to see
from the beginning
just as it was leaving
you that showed me the faces
in the realms of summer
the rivers the moments of gardens
all the roads that led here
the smiles of recognition
the silent rooms at nightfall
and have looked through the glasses
my mother was wearing when she died
you that I have never seen
except nowhere in a mirror
please go on showing me
faces you led me to
daylight the bird moment
the leaves of morning
as long as I look
hoping to catch sight
of what has not yet been seen
- W. S. Merwin
A Poem About a Farm
Fruit trees
A hill
White golden grasses
Dogs children roaming
A tractor filled with people
Circling around in circles
Under blue heaven skies
Friends gathered sipping wine
A brick oven baking
Round circles of dough
Butterflies, flowers, music
A sense of peace
Community, spoken words
My friends have a farm
Where souls meet
In nature and love.
- Nancy Long
Easter Morning In Wales
A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
Neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like broken nets.
Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
If I am really seeing, or dreaming,
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.
- David Whyte
Conflict
I’d like to propose a toast…
to dreams
and to the bold
Men and Women
that dare to dream them
to the wild-eyed visionaries
that plant seeds in their
hearts with hopes
to one day see them
come to pass
for prayers
sweeter than papayas
that rise from the
deepest darkest
depths of our cellars
where my heart
is pumping out
prayers like mass
to the foresight
that illuminates our
foreshadows that
whirl in the glass
of our souls
to those robust
farm workers clad
in jeans, flannels
handkerchiefs and hats
for all the Mamas and Papas that
wear their skin like worn leather
who are wrinkled and red like raisins
and whose wrinkles hold stories like wine jugs
and whose woes are ten miles deeper than
any winemaker’s pocket book
this ones for them
for all of the grandmas
and grandpas that look like stucco
whose eyes look like ice wines
with frost outlining their irises
for the crows-feet perched
perfectly on their eye-lids
and their white hair flowing
like broken clouds passing
through windmill slices
for century old spines like gnarly
vines in vineyards for lilac diamonds
to the god-like elders
for our aging wines and
their timeless guidance
this ones for floral notes
sung by the brown folks
for the flower vendor
the one that puts
the rose in rosary
for a gorgeous culture
that rose from dirt so openly
for arms that open like blossoms
for womb-like palms that deliver
the grape from bondage
and carry it from
conception to fruition
and beyond the goblet
for the seed that dreams itself
larger than grapes and transcends
wine, song, couplet and sonnet
to cherry pickers like
rebels with barreled chests
waging war with their wages
who hurl their dreams
like Molotov cocktails
into our amber waves of grain
whose knuckles are
gnarled and strained
for the work of a dreamer
is stainless and honest
for the protagonist, the antithesis, the subplot
and most importantly the conflict
you see
I know copper-skinned
women and men
that work for pennies
I know Mothers that
never feel beaten
machine-like Mothers
that clean hotels by day
sell Avon at night
and work the fields
on the weekends
so this ones for freedom
for children with eyes like plums
whose hair looks like dark chocolate
waterfalls pouring out and catching the sun
for precious sun-flowers
with green thumbs that
have never been embarrassed
of their hardworking parents
that pick pears and pluck asparagus
this ones for the families that get scattered
for work all across the Americas
its ugly
I know a girl that was
held for ransom at birth
just beneath the border
by bad men known
as Coyotes who you
gotta pay to smuggle dreams
into this country
its beyond ugly
its heart crushing
so this ones for the underbelly
for the juggling of children over rivers
for dodging dogs & militias
for sliding dreams passed
the law writers passing
laws higher than the
barb wire their casting
the people they’re pruning
and the hopes they’re smashing
to the Mighty Migrant Worker
may your hands and spine
always nurture the vine
may the cups of all your tomorrows
be filled with the fruits of your labor
and may the dreams you dream of find freedom
in the land of your neighbor
To you
- Jordan Chaney
Tweet Prayer for Poets
Choose rock or sand;
prepare a face to suit
the places where you stand.
Crisis, stasis, oasis or dust?
Calliope, Erato, look over us.
- David Beckman
Passover
Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .
and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
- Exodus 12: 7 & 13
They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.
But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.
Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.
- Lynn Ungar
The Garden of Love
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
- William Blake
Letter to Jerusalem
To hold the bird and not to crush her, that is the secret.
Sand turned too quickly to cement and who cares if the builders lose their arms?
The musk of smoldered rats on sticks that trailed their tails through tunnels underground.
Trickster of light, I walk your cobbled alleys all night long and drink your salt.
City of bones, I return to you with dust on my tongue.
Return to your ruined temple, your spirit of revolt.
Return to you, the ache at the center of the world.
- Elana Bell
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XXIX)
Ascension in Silk Pajamas
for Irene Perez
While most decline in their final days
Slack jawed and pallid, holding on,
You will ascend.....
Perhaps in the quiet of the early hours, as dawn teases
the horizon and when least expected.
Not with a struggle, but with the flutter of butterfly wings
Perceptible only to those with the finest-tuned senses.
You will slip out on that last elegant breath, your serenity swelling
Beyond the beautiful body you have inhabited
And the tender hearts encircling you
Past one last glimpse of your purposeful existence
Kissing it tenderly as you fly
Willingly, into the unknown.
- Fran Carbonaro
A Thousand Years of Healing
From whence my hope, I cannot say,
except it grows in the cells of my skin,
in my envelope of mysteries
it hums.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of the earth,
it whispers.
Beneath the wail and dissonance in the world,
hope’s song grows.
Until I know that with this turning
we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
one thousand years of healing!
Winged ones and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all the swimming creatures,
even we, wary two-leggeds
hum, and call, and create the Changing Song.
We remake all our relations.
We convert our minds to the Earth.
In this turning time
we finally learn to chime and blend,
attune our voices; sing the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin the new habit,
getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.
- Susa Silvermarie
April Chores
When I take the chilly tools
from the shed's darkness, I come
out to a world made new
by heat and light.
The snake basks and dozes
on a large flat stone.
It reared and scolded me
for raking too close to its hole.
Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam.
- Jane Kenyon
YES! Thank you, Larry ... this expresses so well the vision that has indeed been growing in the cells of me as well. I have been encouraging people to focus on this new reality growing around us instead of bemoaning the mess we are leaving. This says it perfectly. Blessings ....
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Exercise
First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day
then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible
follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count
forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again
go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire
forget fire
- W.S. Merwin
Spirit
spirit calls out your name
when lightning flashes
spirit makes a trail
and okay sometimes we catch a glimpse
Yeats' wife begins dictation
on the train outside San Bernardino
years later we listen and
fall inward to
silence
your life is gold within
sun behind clouds
still gives off light
is it too easy to say
life is blessed
and has freedom gone hidden
what is death
except
dark stone in the center of the path
- Jack Crimmins
The Dark Stone
for Jack Crimmins
There in the path, it waits
The dark stone, in the center–
The place we hoped never to arrive.
Life is littered with so many losses,
Dark stones, scattered in the fields and paths,
Betrayals by death, dishonesty, disappointment.
What happens if we meet that stone with wonder,
Walk to its cruel center, sit in its
Sorrowful presence?
Here, yes here, in the heart of
Fear, disillusion, chaos and
Confusion, peace arrives, a soft surprise.
- Rebecca del Rio
The Scream
It exploded out of
the short, squat woman,
curdling every molecule
in the library parking lot until
the whole little bay became
an emblem of her terror.
She stood silent, and the air
began to clear. Then she
erupted again, shrill syllables
--Aleut? Inuit? Tibetan?—
rolling off her tongue.
She stood on the curb beside
three travel-cases
the taxi driver had set there
before driving away.
Now her curse opened
to pure ululation:
visions of Algerian women,
revolution, apocalypse;
witchcraft.
Though I could not visit
the places where
her sounds had originated,
I knew the translations:
rage, horror. And this
much more: in
those bags
lay all she owned.
And no one
was coming
to take her
home.
- Max Reif
God Says Yes To Me
I asked God if it was OK to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was OK to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don¹t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I¹m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
- Kaylin Haught
Lutheran Sea
One wave follows another
beneath the heel of the wind;
the spray blows landward,
but lacking salt or iodine
it smells oddly Protestant,
carrying the faintest tang
of wet iron,
well water
sluiced in a bucket
from a cabin you visited once
when you were a boy,
water that numbed the tongue
as if it had dripped
from a seam of ice,
blue and glistening,
in a cave
where nymphs of winter
with red fingers
preened before mirrors of frost,
dead cold sober.
- James Armstrong
Han-shan Is The Cure For Warts
My job was eating me night and day,
my wife threatening to leave, taking
even the stroller and the quilt.
A family of warts blossomed on my thumb
so big I introduced them to tellers and clerks.
Then I bumped into Han-shan in the bookstore,
one hundred poems so small I read them all.
We moved to a new place. My wife
smiles out on sidewalks where children ride.
I work in a room so quiet I can hear my heartbeat.
My warts are gone, no marks, no scars.
- James P. Lenfestey
The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
- Yehuda Amichai
Han Shan
Down in the city
they speed in the streets
Up on the mountain
we walk on the path
Down in the city
they see how fast
something can be done
Up on the mountain
we watch the dogwood blossom
First the christmas balls
then the little birds' mouths
followed by eggs in the nest
how I love that stage,
and that is followed
by campion holding hands
over head
when two petals still hold
and the other two have let go
Just yesterday...
Was it a new speed record?
for the street runners
…. or was it a bomb
that made news.
Selling fear in the city
is so easy.
Up on the mountain
with the dogwood blooming.
we just say:
Is that so?
Why were they running on paved streets?
Where were they going?
Didn't they hear?
It is spring.
- David Bean
For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
- Jane Hirshfield
The Kama Sutra of Kindness: Position Number 3
It's easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else
wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs
you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups
you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side
there's never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back
you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it
burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun
- Mary Mackey
We Have A Beautiful Mother
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.
- Alice Walker
Love This Miraculous World
Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.
- Wendell Berry
Taking the Dogs to the Beach
Took my dogs to the beach today -the old lady Sara and
the young upstart Emmy.
Sara, a lab mix, used to live to go places but is now mostly confined to the yard; she was very excited!
Nevertheless, I had to lift all 95lbs of her
into the back of my Prius.
Emmy, my sharp and alert 68 pound Sheppard
practically jumped over us to fit in as well.
They smelled the beach miles before we arrived.
The car fogged up with dog breath.
Out like we came in, old lady Sara huffing and puffing
before we got 10 feet from the car, Emmy already annoyed at the slow pace.
30 yards from where we started, Sara lies down near the lapping shore of the sea. Her eyes and her memory were much bigger than her arthritic body could manage. No frolicking in the surf, no chasing of balls sticks, birds or sea foam.
This was it.
She could go no further. She lay panting in the sand, staring out to sea.
Emmy wined and pulled on the leash saying without any words: “come on let’s go!”
I wonder what she sees, my old friend, in the rhythmic pounding of the surf, the eternal grinding down of things.
Does she know?
Perhaps…
All that lives must die,
all things flow back to the sea from which they came.
The best we can do is remember the good things
and not be afraid.
For God will not leave us comfortless.
- George Gittleman
O Sweet Spontaneous
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee,
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
- e.e. cummings
Until We Rise
They stood, teetering, on the window sills,
97 stories or 100 stories high,
and then, looking back
into the smoke and flames,
they held hands and jumped
hurling
spinning
careening
tumbling
through miles of open air
until they landed here,
in our hearts, where we
dig through the rubble
of our lives
to find them
and reach in, taking their hands in ours,
until we rise with them
from the Land of the Dead
into the new life we promise to become.
- Pesha Joyce Gertler
Shirt
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—
Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
- Robert Pinsky
Sonnets To Orpheus
Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much.
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.
- Rainer Marie Rilke
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
Milk Bone
only crumbs in my pocket
we walk slowly
smells no longer interest you
your world reduced to me
I am your religion
I will betray you
we walk the edge together
we will both fall far
- Les Bernstein
Debtors
They used to say we're living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?
- Jim Harrison
Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space
May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss
May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away
May you integrate the wisdoms of your passage
May you feel the sacred burden of your own life in your arms
May you treat yourself with exquisite kindness and patience
May you find peace in your cocoon . . . acceptance and surrender
May you be transformed by your own darkness and rise renewed
- Kay Crista
Gravity of Stars
Discovered while staring at the bottom of a coffee-cup
that I’ve spent too much time looking-up.
That if your head is arched too high in the clouds
you can’t appreciate how much you have grown
once you have forgotten the ground.
I want to forget about stars.
About things that fly.
Skyscrapers.
Superheroes.
And God.
I want to find magnitude in a molehill,
hard work on an ant’s back,
bad choice in an empty bottle,
forgiveness in a person’s car wreck.
I want to see color the same way a blind man must feel it.
Tell me when it was when I forgot about simplicity.
When I started to believe that someone who could do trigonometry in their
head mattered more than a 33-year-old man who finally woke up this
morning
and decided he was done wasting his life.
Today, he was gonna figure out to be better at living again.
We need to remember to go up to every person we see with scars
shake their hand and say,
Congratulations for surviving whatever it was
that caused you to hurt yourself.
Stop wishing on stars and start believing in ourselves again
for this world is a ticking time bomb;
everyday that passes is just another moment less.
I want to see my reflection in an eye of a fly.
No more stargazing.
Waterfall wishing.
Prayer giving.
I’m starting to get a crook in my neck by starring in the clouds for too long.
I want to be inspired by heartbeats again.
Hold people like my favorite book,
kiss the fat pimple on a teenager’s forehead and say,
I hope you don’t think that is a factor in how beautiful you are,
‘Cuz it is not.
Tell Michael Ray Stevens
It doesn’t make you bad to be in love with a boy—
love is what makes us human.
Be happy that you feel something for someone—
you’d be surprised how difficult that is for some.
I want to tell pilots to try swimming.
That the sky is way too beautiful for us to be in it.
We need to come down from our high-horse.
Tomorrow I’m going to travel Austin, TX by crawling on my knees
in hopes that when I stand back up I’ll see things differently.
I’m done dreaming of astronauts.
The moon is a made-up romantic.
Put me in the pavement.
Lie my carcass in the cracks.
Let me be humbled by the power of speaking by the silent dance
of a deaf man’s hands.
I want to watch closely the lips of a mute
who wishes for nothing other than to hear the sound of his voice.
Visit a hospital and hold the hand of a woman in a comma dreaming
about moving again.
For the sky has nothing in it as interesting as the diversity on this earth.
That is why I don’t care anymore about flying.
There is a reason the stars keep falling.
They are jealous of the things we get to see
by just being here—
On
the
ground. . .. .
- Lacey Roop
Another beautiful start to another beautiful day. Thanks, Larry
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