Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Swimming Lessons

A mile across the lake, the horizon bare
or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches.
No sand. No voices calling me back.
Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair
push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns,
an inch here. Or there.

You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap
and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life
vest for your lazy little daughter.
Under me, green deepened to black.
You said, “Swim out to the deep water.”
I was seven years old. I paddled forth

and the water held me. Sunday you took away
one block, the front one. I stared down
at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale,
not fit for a place without roads.
Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them
except the toeless foot of the snail.

Tuesday you took away two more blocks.
Now I could somersault and stretch.
I could scratch myself against trees like a cat.
I even made peace with the weeds that fetch
swimmers in the noose of their stems
while the cold lake puckers and preens.

Friday the fourth block broke free. “Let it go,”
you said. When I asked you to take
out the block that kept jabbing my heart,
I felt strong. This was the sixth day.
For a week I wore the only part
of the vest that bothered to stay:

a canvas strap with nothing to carry.
The day I swam away from our safe shore,
you followed from far off, your stealthy oar
raised, ready to ferry me home
if the lake tried to keep me.
Now I watch the tides of your body

pull back from the hospital sheets.
“Let it go,” you said. “Let it go.”
My heart is not afraid of deep water.
It is wearing its life vest,
that invisible garment of love
and trust, and it tells you this story.

- Nancy Willard

Susanna


Nobody in the hospital
Could tell the age
Of the old woman who
Was called Susanna
I knew she spoke some English
And that she was an immigrant
Out of a little country
Trampled by armies
Because she had no visitors
I would stop by to see her
But she was always sleeping
All I could do
Was to get out her comb
And carefully untangle
The tangles in her hair
One day I was beside her
When she woke up
Opening small dark eyes
Of a surprising clearness
She looked at me and said
You want to know the truth?
I answered Yes
She said it’s something that
My mother told me
There’s not a single inch
Of our whole body
That the Lord does not love
She then went back to sleep.
- Anne Porter

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

- Joy Harjo

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles



It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.


Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe if is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.


“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Bun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”


And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Hear the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying
My Woman is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”


There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with the headings like ‘Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusing inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.
Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.


And “The Days of Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends


How easy he had made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
my legs like his, and listen.


- Billy Collins

Shine, Perishing Republic


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make
earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing
republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left
the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he
walked on earth.


- Robinson Jeffers

1925 Jeffers published this--before the Depression, before Joseph McCarthy, before the Vietnam War, before 1968, before Nixon, before shock and awe! I would like to take some sadly smiling comfort in this date, hoping the republic isn't finally really perishing, though it feels like it.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Shine, Perishing Republic


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, ...

---

"next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn's early my

country 'tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gory

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

- e. e. cummings

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

"next to of course god america i
...
- e. e. cummings

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MidsummerRelated Poem Content Details

The adolescent night, breath of the town,
Porchswings and whispers, maple leaves unseen
Deploying moonlight quieter than a man dead
After the locust’s song. These homes were mine
And are not now forever, these on the steps
Children I think removed to many places,
Lost among hushed years, and so strangely known.

This business is well ended. If in the dark
The firefly made his gleam and sank therefrom,
Yet someone’s hand would have him, the wet grass
Bed him no more. From corners of the lawn
The dusk-white dresses flutter and are past.
Before our bed time there were things to say,
Remembering tree-bark, crickets, and the first star…

After, and as the sullenness of time
Went on from summer, here in a land alien
Made I my perfect fears and flower of thought:
Sleep being no longer swift in the arms of pain,
Revisitations are convenient with a cough,
And there is something I would say again
If I had not forever, if there were time.

- Robert Fitzgerald

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up

https://trythisroad.files.wordpress....rlinghetti.jpg
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

I Am Waiting
...
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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I love this one! I first heard it in 1968, recited by a man who called himself "The Great Lorenzo" and went around the country in a van with his female partner, reciting great poems by heart in cafes. I saw him in St. Louis, Missouri, and was inspired by him and by the poem...and still am, by both!

I love esp the way Ferlinghetti uses the title phrase and "a rebirth of wonder" in different ways throughout the poem. It's one of the best, I guess you could say, "catalogue poems" (is that the right name for an incantatory poem which starts all or nearly all its line with the same words?) , that I've read.

https://www.realnothings.com/northbe...citylights.jpg

ps: a friend, reading this poem which I shared on my own FB page today, asked whether City Lights, Ferlinghetti's bookstore, is still there. I wrote that F (last I heard) seems to be going strong at 90 or older...and I dug up this photo that I took of the store a few years back, AND a poem I wrote inside the store! :):

https://www.realnothings.com/northbe...orthbeach7.htm

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

I Am Waiting
...
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Wait no more, for now is the time for all good men, (and women) to come to the aide of their country.

A Name For All

Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedom—we must maim

Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.

I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.

- Hart Crane

Woman Receiving Dialysis Next Bed Over


They always tell me they’re
going to come with
something and
they never
do.

ow.

ow.

I’m hungry.
Shoot.

Shoot.

Who’s that? Alligator. Quail.
It’s not fair. See
I don’t eat. Oh
I want to
too.

- Nancy Cavers Dougherty

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

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Clearing

...

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Very poignant.

John Muir on Mt. Ritter

After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble dawn the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.

- Gary Snyder

We Need Each Other Now

We need each other now.

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/wacco...1_09-49-41.png

In truth, we always have.
But as things disintegrate,
as chaos and disorder reign,
we become like bones,
scattered and
stripped clean of all
that is inessential.
Let’s reassemble ourselves,
the way Isis did with Osiris,
or La Loba with her wolf bones.
Let’s find a new configuration,
this part mine, that part yours –
Perhaps something original
will emerge, or
something ancient.
Let’s light a candle now, friends,
so together we might see
how to begin.

- Maya Spector

You’re So Vain

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain,
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you?
Don’t you?
- Carly Simon


Advancing age, retirement brings space
Space to think, dream and consider
Look in the mirror, fool, I say
What do you see? What do others see?

Advancing age brings more visits to healers
Healers of many kinds and natures
These days dentist and internist I visit
They examine, prod me; pull teeth

Tooth removed; temporary plate required
Plate gags me: I ask how long
Healer: you’ll get used to it
Asks am I concerned about my smile?

Sudden bulge on my elbow
Is a tennis ball hiding there?
Healer says wear a long-sleeved shirt
Asks are you going to the beach?

My dusty brain is confused
Do I seem so vain?
I ask to be cured not offered
Men’s wear guidance

- Alan Fisher

On the Block


in a dim-light meander
a writer's concern for precision,
compression, lyrical sound
and one simple elemental truth
goes down a very bad path

through the double lens
of imagination and memory
a flawed and flimsy
lower case moment
will be mugged

twisted turns of interpretation
coerce a deeper register of inquiry
concluding with a neat ending
and … oh, could it be ... indelibility

pending yet another bon mot
from an empty poet
the dim light of the computer cursor
blinks on and on
ready to surrender all its belongings
to a merciful delete


- Les Bernstein

For the Last Wolverine

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnarling head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice screaming that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibres from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing
Thing,” with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die
Out.

- James L. Dickey

The Afterlife

A man fell out of the tree in our backyard. I ran over
to help him. “Would you like some tea?” I said. “I think
I broke my back,” he said. “Perhaps some ice cream would
be just the thing,” I said. “Lend me your hand,” he said.
I gave him my hand and tried to pull him up. When he was
upright, he said, “Where am I?” “You’re in my backyard,” I
said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said.
“It’s just an ordinary yard, a small garden, a few flowers,”
I said. “Yes, it’s a sorry sight. How can you stand to live
here?” he said. “Oh, it’s my home,” I said. “Home? That’s
a curious word,” he said. “Where do you live?” I said. “Live?
Live? That’s a funny question,” he said. “I don’t live anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m a dead man. I just float
around,” he said. “Well, I’ve never met a dead man. I’m
pleased to meet you,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to
scream or something,” he said. “Oh no, I’m really pleased,”
I said. “It’s really kind of you to drop by.” “I didn’t
drop by. It was the wind,” he said. “And then the wind stopped
and I fell into the tree.” “How lucky for me,” I said. “You’ll
be going with me, of course, when I leave. You’ll never be
coming back,” he said.

- James Tate

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

- John O'Donohue

Their Ages

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

You grew up with three
Angel brothers and sisters.
My only child, I sought
To reassure me, you that
You were not alone.

Nathan, Leah and Lily
I named them.
Today Nathan would be 44,
Leah, 35 and Lily soon-to-be 30.
All three were lost in an unwanted
Gush of blood and pain, that sadly,

Even your birth and good life
Cannot mute.
I kept them alive
In my heart and yours,
Though their visage remained
Invisible. You grew

Before my eyes, beautiful,
Carnal, and complete. You grew
Surrounded by angels,
All that they might have been.

Losing what might have been
Is loss, too. Invisible
Like a quiet disease.
A future frustrated or denied
Can fester in a heart,
Can rot a psyche
Unless mourned
For all its unmoored dreams.

So I named my babies,
Grieved my angels. I gave
Their memory to you
To walk with you in
The loneliness that is Life.
I kept them alive and
I always know their ages.

- Rebecca del Rio

this amazing day

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

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

- Adrienne Rich

They carved “Nigger Lover”
On the hood of our car
After Dad came back from Selma
He went because he said he had to
Just like he’d done in ’44
To him it was the same war
Fought in a different uniform
But you there
Breaking windows
Just remember:
You have no right to right
If you do wrong yourself
And revenge is not justice
Just wrong turned inside out

- Mark Steensland

How could I forget?


Headed to Vermont
With a head full of Frost
How did he last
through all his tragedies
to have tea with Nikita
in his late eighties
sent by Kennedy
not that long ago
a President looked to a poet
and the Russians loved him
because he was a farmer

Yeats loved the soil too
and of course O'Donohue
and Seamus Heaney too
the stock of fathers
who could wield a spade
so sons could wield a pen.

- Brian McSweeney

True Fasting

Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’
Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Isaiah 58

Anchorage

Seagulls cackle and cry

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into the light of day and night

It's 2:30 am, we hear long sad
piercing screams that cry us to sleep

Like a hundred lost kittens meowing

We are new to Alaska, first timers here
just one day in

On the 8am news we hear that the
largest iceberg to date has broken off
the Antarctic shelf

Out the window we see people walking to work, a stray dog, a UPS truck drives by

Oh, when did we stop listening to the birds

We read that Moose have been seen walking on the streets of downtown Anchorage

- Patricia LeBon Herb

After the War

For Joseph Flum

When he got to the farmhouse, he rifled through
the cabinets, drawers, and cupboards,
and his buddies did too. The place was abandoned,
or so he thought, and his buddies did too.

He tried to talk to people in town, and his buddies did too,
but he was the only one whose Yiddish made it
across into German. They took his meaning.
He, in the farmhouse, took a camera and a gun,

but his buddies, who knows. About the gun,
it’s also hard to say, but after the war he took up
photography, why not, and shot beautiful women
for years. Got pretty good at it, and how.

Won prizes and engraved plates, put them in a drawer, forgot
the war, forgot his buddies, forgot the women, forgot the drawer.

- Rachel Galvin

Ego


Ego is the measure of all things.
Just beyond it, the immeasurable.

Ego glimpses that eternal tract
and everything it says about it boasts.

It hasn’t been there. It claims a romp in the hay
with a babe it saw up on the silver screen.

The ego colonizes from afar the afar.
Its real job lies the other way. Back

in the direction of the earth we are to feed
with the manure we are to be.

Ego is the measure of all things, but one. From it it
turns. Watch it bow magnanimously.

- Bruce Moody

Being a Lake

He has never dreamed of being a lake
in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
Surely there could be no better, in the way
of dreamy aspirations: to be clear and cold
and swim through by trout. To allow the sunlight
far into your depths, to have depths no one
Will ever visit. To be ceilinged by ice
and many feet of snow in winter, to shine pure blue
into the pure blue of the sky, to show the stars
the stars, to be drunk by wild animals.
And to admit an occasional human,
who, because of the memory of having been there,
might dream of being there. Being there.
Not a visitor but a dreamer, dreaming
this very lake is what he's always wanted to be.

- Robert Wrigley

Thank you, Larry. This shifts the paradigm in the regenerative direction....

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Being a Lake...

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Traveling At Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

- Wendell Berry

Brought to Tears

I weep in the middle of a story more often
than in the midst of real life events.
In story the meaning is so compressed.
Whole lives crowd into a few pages.
The bible is an entire library, and
you can carry it in a backpack.

Every story has direction
every detail has intention
if only in rhythm or ornamentation.
And by the end, a story makes
some kind of sense;
even if it is unbearable.
Both the beauty and the suffering!

In my life so much is arrived at by
meandering paths, all the branching
directions., Sometimes the meaning
Is missed or unclear. Other times I go by a way
that is not chosen, but imposed
the way snowflakes express themselves:
we can see, but only under a magnifying glass
that hidden forces inform their crystalline beauty.

In our common lives front-page news is random:
The Pope, or the symphony will be in town.
Or the County Fair, an advance in neuroscience or
Another ecological disaster strikes, usually
in a region already decimated by poverty,
A new planet has been discovered with moons,
a five-year-old wins a spelling bee.
A gourmet recipe delights foodies. Or wine.
And all this happens simultaneously. Random
violence repeating itself the world over,
not resolving. And there is so much suffering
like starvation, it overwhelms . It overwhelms.

In story, an author’s intention is more clear:
an ecology of lives and their patterns, the
designs leave a glittering trail like a snail
a narrative of the way we found. Of suffering
redeemed. Of lessons learned. Or a poem,
Its word music bringing us to tears.

- Judith Stone

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Brought to Tears
....
- Judith Stone

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Hope Is Not For The Wise

Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
Open-eyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
The time’s events would seem mere chaos but all
Drift the one deadly direction. But this is only
The August thunder of the age, not the November.
Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
And think November as good as April, the wise remember
That Caesar and even Augustus had heirs,
And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
And the barbarians; music and religion, honor and mirth
Renewed life’s lost enchantments. But if life even
Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

- Robinson Jeffers

Vinny’s Garden



It was one of many on the street lined with sycamores;

fifteen square feet of patchy grass sprinkled with seeds,

an invitation to starlings, sparrows and pigeons, all

oblivious to each other’s feasting, yet not interfering. A cat

crouched quietly beside a yellow rose bush; two squirrels

cavorted about in great haste chiding one another; people

strolled by with indifference to the living harmony.


- Marvin Blaustein

Living

in the earth-deposits

of our history

Today a backhoe divulged

out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle

amber

perfect

a hundred-year-old
cure for fever

or melancholy

a tonic
for living on this earth

in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered

from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years

by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin

of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold

a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman

denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds

came

from the same source as her power

- Adrienne Rich

The Way Back

Why is it I can only trust people
Who have had their heart broken
100 times who have been
tortured in foreign jails who have
repeated their time in rehab over
and over their
families going broke
whose life companions have
died in their arms or
whose newborn arrived still or with
unexpected chromosomes or
those living in countries ruled by hateful
tyrants and with forced circumstance
could not leave?
Perhaps it is because they have not stopped singing
Perhaps because they have come back
They have come back singing
It is they who left that blood
red twine along the
labyrinth
for me
to find
my way
back.

- Kristy Hellum

(Illustrated by Ronaldo)

The Good Life

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

- Tracy K. Smith

Blazing Trees



You have only to see

the blazing sunset through

the trees to be

in that dazzling presence

and catch a voice saying

“Take off your masks!”



With a clatter they land

all around, but you barely

notice because the fire

in your heart is bursting

toward that bright glow

on the horizon.



And when its last

glimmering rays are gone—

from human sight—

you're left with a gateway

that will open

even in your dark hour.

- Raphael Block

Be Music, Night

Be music, night,

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That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs

Be a hand, sea,
That her dreams may watch
Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world

Be a voice, sky,
That her beauties may be counted
And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
Into the mirror of her loveliness

Be a road, earth,
That her walking may take thee
Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires

O be a world and a throne, God,
That her living may find its weather
And the souls of ancient bells in a child's book
Shall lead her into Thy wondrous house

- Kenneth Patchen

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light!

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In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;

Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?

- Mitsuyoshi Toge


Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).

The Answer

Then what is the answer? - Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their
tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least
ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for
evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal peace or happiness. These dreams will not be
fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole
remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his
history … for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the divine beauty of
the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in
despair when his days darken.

- Robinson Jeffers

Listening


Lately
I have been listening to trees.

I asked them
if they have been talking to me
all along.

“We’ve been murmuring,”
I heard.
“Contentedly,
as you’ve been listening
to others,
to Emil’s spirit voice,
to Grandfather Fire,
to your hilltop Roble.

“Who you listen to,
who you hear,
depends upon you,
where you are in your listening.

“Everything,
of course,
has a voice.”

- Trout Black

Choosing Who To Be

You, who wake up each morning remembering who you are,
must think it strange that I, upon awakening
have no idea who I am, or what I’m doing in this room,
in this bed, beneath these covers.

It takes hours to put together a functioning identity,
like a woman trying on dozens of outfits to find just the right combination
for a night on the town.

With no basis to work from,
no map or structure to follow,
I try on dozens of masks,
deciding who to be today.

The mayor of a small town?
A policeman in riot gear?
An oncologist in a white coat giving her patient bad news?
A reporter following a story about a missing child?
A corporate executive deciding to clear a rainforest for a palm oil plantation?

When any identity will do, how will I choose?
And who is doing the choosing?

I could be a star, shining in the blackness of space,
a diatom at the bottom of the ocean,
a comet on its path around the sun,
or the color of sunlight.

One day I became a granite boulder in the middle of a playground,
enjoying playful children scrambling over me, laughing
and jumping off my peak into the ocean of sand surrounding me.

On another, I became the scent of night-blooming jasmine,
wafting on soft air, entering nostrils of animals,
and thrilling delicate moths attuned to my molecular structure.

You, who have only one fixed center, may feel envious of my freedom.
And I envy you for your stability and fortitude.
To be the same, day after day, takes courage and stamina.

In my incarnations, newly chosen with each sunrise,
I have lived a million lives, each one unique, precious as a gemstone.
And yet, I have no companions on this journey.

Be grateful for who you are, and what you have chosen.

- Lion Goodman

Deepening The Wonder

Death is a favor to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity,
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just traveling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks

And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that

We are just a midair flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world

Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.

- Hafiz
(translation by Daniel Ladinsky)

THE COSMOLOGY OF FINDING YOUR SPOT

The Resistantism of all other places
On the floor among filters and the spillings
The cosmology of the floor of the Nation
The cosmology of finding your place
The cosmology of smelling and feeling your Natural place
inside the place, feeling the filters
feeling the rock, feeling the roll
feeling the social spray at that level
low down, with the filters and the feet
feeling the place you can fold all four legs
and be man's best friend to the End, among the filters
and the feet, in the rock, and in the roll
in the clock and in the roll, in the hole
of the social bilge The Great White Dog
of the Rockchalk, seeks his place Seeks
The place for Him there, tries every scrap of Space
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk
moves under the Social seeking his own Place
in the constant present snap of eternity
listening with the german dislocated castanet
His Nose Is under the great pin ball rolling in heaven above
thru the barren terrain of feet He moves
from place to place seeking his place
The resisters the dogs seek their place
WAYNE KIMBALL told me all this
WAYNE KIMBALL sits in the booths, WAYNE KIMBALL
knows about the The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk doesn't
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk has been there
Western Civilization is Beer
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk
went thru the door of Western Civilization
Which is north of the Barbershop
and north of the sailor pants incense shop
The Great White Dog went between all that
and the Gaslight, The Great White Rockchalk Dog
shakes hands with both paws indiscriminately
For he Seeks his own true place on the floor
He disregards the social He seeks the Place
he seeks The Space his soul can occupy
In His restless search he looks only for the Place
Where he can come to rest in his own true Place
and that might be on the floor of the rockchalk
The great White Dog is not Interdicted by opinion
He accepts the floor of the Rock Chalk as an Area,
like any other, he will test that space
He is preoccupied only with the Search
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk is not social
WAYNE KIMBALL told me all this, WAYNE KIMBALL
is social, he knows only persons, he doesn't
give a shit for the floor of the Rockchalk
WAYNE KIMBALL is neurotic like us, he wants
to smoke Grass, WAYNE KIMBALL sits in the booths
WAYNE KIMBALL drinks beer, has a part time job
pretending to be literate, WAYNE KIMBALL uses
the telephone and all other public Utilities
including Cocaine, The Great White Dog
of The Rockchalk is full of shit and can't shit
until he finds his place, WAYNE KIMBALL has diarrhea
WAYNE KIMBALL hasn't got a driver's license
WAYNE KIMBALL is thin and knows everything that happens
He has ears, He is a corrupt little mongrel like us
turned on to everything hopeless and bullshit
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk is dumb
and doesn't know anything but his instinct for the search
for his place somewhere in the litter
of the filters and the literally dropped dreams
of the Great Rock Chalk, he smells the dreams
on the floor dropped from between the legs
of young English majors, ejected from between the
Dual Spraycans of the fraternizers
He seeks his place on top of this matter
among the feet of the privileged nation on the floor
of the Great shit, Rock Chalk Rock Chalk White Rock
Calk Dog, And WAYNE KIMBALL Smokes cigarettes
and Thoreaus them ontoOntoOntoOnto the floor
already predicated by cancer, the slow movement of Cancer
And I love these dogs because they are us and more us
than we are and they seek their places as do the true
whether they are Resisters or just scared or both
They are the twin dogs of creation in our image
and I give them both the floor as I give the Resisters
This Poem from the throne of Belief as the Egyptians
Gave and took from the Dogs Their access to Heaven
That we may all be Gods and seek our Place.

- Ed Dorn
(1969, Lawrence, Kansas)


Ed Dorn (1929-1999)
Poet and author of numerous works, Dorn is perhaps best known for his five part poem Gunslinger and as an alumni of the experimental, interdisciplinary Black Mountain College. His fictional character Wayne Kimball from the poem The Cosmology of Finding your Spot, which takes place in Lawrence, Kansas is the compilation of two Lawrence residents and fellow writers Wayne Propst and George Kimball.

Thanks, Larry, for the paragraph about the author/poet Ed Dorn.

This one begs to be read aloud!

However I didn't wait for it to beg.

I quickly recognized this and read it aloud as an offering, to Ed, Georg Propst, and myself! Powerful!

Thanks again,
dusty

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THE COSMOLOGY OF FINDING YOUR SPOT...

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What then Hafez?

Hafez said:
“THE GREAT RELIGIONS ARE THE SHIPS AND POETRY THE LIFE BOATS
EVERY SANE MAN I’VE EVER KNOWN HAS JUMPED OVERBOARD.”

But you may ask: what then Hafez?

Then we’ll drift across uncharted seas in lifeboats without the antiquated provisions of clerics.

We’ll survive by drinking holy rain-water, catching luminescent spirit fish, and making midnight prayers of the heart.

Then after years or decades, we’ll return to a great ship that leads us onward, but not back to the familiar oceans of certainty.

We’ll sit and humbly join hands with those huddled in the dark recesses of the ship’s steerage, who have left home forever in search of undiscovered lands.

- Bruce Silverman

American Nightmare

I'm in bed with America.
America is writhing and moaning in her sleep,
twisting the bed sheets around her
as if coiled in the grip of a giant boa constrictor.
America whimpers in her sleep
and turns her head to the left and to the right.
America is having a nightmare.

America is dreaming that the Inquisition
is back with its old, unimproved tortures.
America is dreaming that the British won
the Revolutionary War and that Franklin,
Washington and Jefferson were hanged at Valley Forge.
America is dreaming that she must increase
her nuclear arsenal because being able
to destroy the world 5,000 times over isn¹t enough
if Russia can destroy the world 6,000 times over.
America is dreaming that the southern plantations
have risen from the dust, and the whips and manacles
the torch and the hood and the noose.
America is dreaming that water is rising
around her house and she can¹t get out
because the EPA has boarded up the doors and windows.
America is dreaming that drinking melted polar ice
has changed her children into Syrian refugees.
America is dreaming that her babysitter
is a registered sex offender.
America is dreaming that her real parents
are dead and impostor parents are forcing
her into the family business of carnival geeking.
America is dreaming that Lincoln has just
shot everyone in Ford¹s Theater.
America is dreaming that she¹s feeling faint
after drinking the cup handed to her by Putin.
America is dreaming that she has nothing left
to eat but the money dragged from the vaults
after the last billionaire committed suicide.
America is dreaming that Whitman and Emerson
have pulled up their grave plots and
relocated them to Ontario.
America is dreaming that all the blood shed by patriots
in her wars has congealed into a malignant tumor
kept in a secret room in the White House.
America is dreaming that Henry Ford has
returned from the dead to help the President
rewrite the Constitution in 144 characters.
America is dreaming that when the Pilgrims
go out to the woods for the first Thanksgiving
all they can find to shoot are skeletons.
America is dreaming that the Italians and Irish
and Poles have been sent back where they came from
across the Atlantic in individual wooden washtubs.
America is dreaming that beneath the site of the World Trade Center
are anti-towers deep underground where
the real masterminds of September 11th
are plotting a new attack.
America is dreaming that the President has hacked
Jesus¹s twitter account
and is repealing the Sermon on the Mount.
America is dreaming that a tiny severed hand
is creeping along the floor like a pale spider
toward the Button.
America is dreaming that a vast stone head
from an exploded planet¹s Mount Rushmore
is hurtling toward Indiana.
America is dreaming ‹ STOP!

America, can you hear me?
(I¹m shaking you by the shoulders.)
I wouldn¹t be in bed with you if I didn¹t love you.
Spare yourself this nightmare.
It doesn¹t have to be this way.
There is still time.

America, dear America, please wake up!

- Thomas Smith

A Mark of Resistance

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Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon's weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I love but cannot save
from floods that are to come;

can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape of nothing
that has ever existed before.

A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.

A mark of resistance, a sign.

- Adrienne Rich

Anyone Who Is Still Trying

Any person, any human, any someone who breaks
up the fight, who spackles holes or FedExes
ice shelves to the Arctic to keep the polar bears
afloat, who talks the wind-rippled woman
down from the bridge. Any individual, any citizen
who skims muck from the coughing ocean,
who pickets across the street from antigay picketers
with a sign that reads, GOD HATES MAGGOTS,
or, GOD HATES RESTAURANTS WITH ZAGAT RATINGS
LESS THAN 27. Any civilian who kisses
a forehead heated by fever or despair, who reads
the X ray, pins the severed bone. Any biped
who volunteers at soup kitchens, who chokes
a Washington lobbyist with his own silk necktie—
I take that back, who gives him mouth-to-mouth
until his startled heart resumes its kabooms.
Sorry, I get cynical sometimes, there is so much
broken in the system, the districts, the crooked
thinking, I’m working on whittling away at this
pessimism, harvesting light where I can find it.
Any countryman or countrywoman who is still
trying, who still pushes against entropy,
who stanches or donates blood, who douses fires
real or metaphorical, who rakes the earth
where tires once zeroed the ground, plants something
green, say spinach or kale, say a modest forest
for restless breezes to play with. Any anyone
from anywhere who considers and repairs,
who builds a prosthetic beak for an eagle—
I saw the video, the majestic bird disfigured
by a bullet, the visionary with a 3-D printer,
with polymer and fidelity, with hours
and hours and hours, I keep thinking about it,
thinking we need more of that commitment,
those thoughtful gestures, the flight afterward


- David Hernandez

Black Holes Exist

The astrophysicists proclaim
Black Holes Exist.
I believe them.
Yes, within my mind I see them
Black against the Black of space.
But now I ask
What are they?
Are they Everything that looks like
Nothing?
Are they Nothing that is also
Everything?
Are they the narcissistic ego
of a cosmic body
swallowing the praise of every star?
I think I’ve seen them walking on Fifth Avenue
and preening in their offices
swallowing the little lights around them
sucking in their hopes of everlasting fame
leaving nothing in their wake
readying their vacuumed contents for a vast explosion
littering the universe with burning gas
the trumpet of collapse.


- William Johnson Everett

Below the City

for the people of Barcelona


In the city of Barcelona, a city
Dripping with the honey of youth,
Draped with history contained within
Walls, witness to love and atrocities,
We pass below the streets in currents
Like schools of disparate fish. We pass
Trying not to notice, not to see
the other.
Youth beautiful, luscious in
Unearned pride, the elderly
Phantoms of time. In between
Swim children, ignorant of unspoken rules.
Sometimes we're not a school, but
A murmuration. We move as one, dancing
And wheeling, a singular mind.
It's then the massive love
we are when we are one,
pierces the pavement above and
the pedestrians smile, not knowing
Why.

- Rebecca del Rio

Young Maples

I remember maples
Smooth bark
Like gray glass
On a February pond
Leafless supple switches
Winter wands
Buds furled with tight-fisted notions
Brewing dreams of leaves and wind
A contained explosiveness in
Sleeping saplings
Alarms and excites me, ready
With the first hint of warmth
To burgeon, to double their size
Nearly splitting their skin with
Calm, wild hurry

I recall when I was eager
To grow into the dream
Of who I was sure I would be
Maples have no hesitancy –
How did mine overtake me? –
Don’t second guess
Or sink weary of being maples
Nor begin to doubt their place
In the woods. Do they?
Perhaps too many snow storms
Rock falls, lightening strikes
Can slow them
Even a tree is not so sure
And of course there are the lumbermen
Two by fours and cheap furniture
In their eyes
I shall return to the young maples
Perhaps if I listen to their leaves
In the April wind

- Garth Gilchrist

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The Moon

Look out at the moon in the sky, as she is right at this moment.
Does she have to be in an eclipse to be so honored and praised?

What about seeing the Essence that is there right now?
Not one drop more or less than when she goes between earth and sun some weeks later.

Will we forget all about her after that news worthy event?
Is there more to see than just the darkness that will appear on that particular date?

What about the Light of Presence that never leaves?
What is there now that is is asking to be seen always?

That which could never be shown on the news.
That which can never be taken away.

But calls to be recognized and seen for what it truly is.
Seen for the Silence that she holds and honors.

For all her trips around the earth she has taken.
For all the times she has shown up both night and day.

There is the true seeing.
Not just for one eclipse or for a one time viewing.

But for each and every moment, a chance to be acknowledged.
For being that Essence and beauty in our heavens, singing her Silence.

- Mary Morgan

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

- Muriel Rukeyser

Looking For A River

We pass the long blue and white
tent, chairs set in sedate rows,
men and women silent shadows

in the heat; preparing for a revival,
they pay us no mind as our car
tires whine past on soft asphalt.

A bay horse grazes in a field; black
Angus stand belly-deep in a farm pond,
tails switching flies, heads down like

somnolent statues cut out of starless
skies. On and on we drive, a little lost,
following the thread of a shaky map.

We’re looking for a river. We’re looking
for a fresh green current, swirls of mica,
trout circling the kettle like holy ghosts.

We’re looking for the long white banner
of a waterfall, the hidden path behind
a plume of mist and ragged lace.

When we get there, we’ll slide across
slick dark gray rocks, push aside moss
cascading out of deep cracks like prophets.

We’ll crawl into that cool dark space
behind the veil, listen to the river preach:
granite gospel from the mouth of a mountain.

- Deborah A. Miranda

Better Thank Expected

Things were not as bad as I had thought.
The scrape in the fender of the rented car
could be hidden with a little white paint
before I returned it to the agency.

This CD of New Age music, which I disliked at first,
with its synthetic wind of pulsing jellyfish,
does a remarkable job of slowing down my heart.

Merely to have survived to this point
is already the most unlikely triumph;
to still be breathing and trying to improve.

Things are definitely better than expected.
I'm not on trial for anything.
I have given up on the idea of great sucess.
The oncologist says the x-ray shows no " abnormalities."


We are always trying to come to a decision,
always in a place where we are making up our minds
whether the soup is good, the flowers pretty,
whether we are fortunate, or poor.

All my life I have been
loved by women,
held up by water,
ignored by war.
I have outlasted the voluntary numbness
I required to remain alive.

Why shouldn't I be able,
why shouldn't I be able now
to walk down the street,

under the overhanging trees,
and raise my arms and say
that the rain shaking down from the leaves

is not an inconvenience but a joy?


- Tony Hoagland

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

...
Merely to have survived to this point
is already the most unlikely triumph;
to still be breathing and trying to improve....

---

:birthday:

Happy Birthday, Larry!

On behalf of all of Waccodom, thank you so much for sharing poetry with us!
It brightens my day and many others! :waccosun:

:thankyou1::birthday::thankyou1::birthday::thankyou1:

Of History and Hope

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn't there yet—
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

- Miller Williams

The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

- Seamus Heaney’s translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

The Chambermaids in the Marriott in Midmorning

are having a sort of coffee klatch as they clean
calling across the corridors in their rich contraltos
while luffing fresh sheets in the flickering gloom
of the turgid passionate soaps they follow from room to room.
In Atlanta they are black, young, with eloquent eyes.
In Toledo white, middle-aged, wearing nurses’ shoes.
In El Paso always in motion diminutive Chicanas
gesture and lift and trill in liquid Spanish.
Behind my “Do Not Disturb” sign I go wherever they go
sorely tried by their menfolk, their husbands, lovers or sons
who have jobs or have lost them, who drink and run around,
who total their cars and are maimed, or lie idle in traction.
The funerals, weddings and births, the quarrels, the fatal gunshots
happen again and again, inventively reenacted
except that the story is framed by ads and coming attractions,
except that what takes a week in real life took only minutes.
I think how static my life is with its careful speeches and classes
and how I admire the women who daily clean up my messes,
who are never done scrubbing with Rabelaisian vigor
through the Marriott’s morning soaps up and down every corridor.

- Maxine Kumin

A wonderful testimonial to these hard-working women - Thank you!!

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Chambermaids in the Marriott in Midmorning

...

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PLEASE DISTURB

I hung out my “please disturb sign”
but nobody did

It would have been fine with me

Nobody reads anymore
it’s all this television

So I stayed on my side of the door
nobody even knocked

It was a nice looking door

Then one morning the maid knocked
She didn’t bother to read my special sign

I yelled, “Come in, oh God, please come in!”
She said, “I’ll come back.”

Nobody reads anymore

- Doug von Koss
After five days at the Royal York Hotel
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. May 25, 1994

At The Flea Market


Last week at the flea market I spied Mahatma Ghandi, Rabbi Abraham Heschel and the Reverend Martin Luther King perusing a small two-pan balancing scale.

One pan was marked good, the other evil.

A discussion then ensued. Said Heschel: this scale is flawed: “the opposite of good is not evil, it’s indifference.”

Ghandi replied: yes, I agree, for “good and evil often are found together.” Then Dr. King spoke and said:

I find this scale to be befuddling because “there’s some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.”

With that they simply walked off.

I timidly stepped forward and bought the scale.

I took it home and measured the weights sitting in the two pans marked good and evil. And here is what I found:

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco..._08-54-32a.png

When compared, good and evil seem to be about equal in

measure, but clearly, at times like this,

it’s necessary to put a finger on the scale.


- Bruce Silverman

If You Want To Pray For Houston


if you want
to pray for Houston
you have to pray
in her way
pray like Beyoncé
when she was
at HSPVA
or Billy and Dusty
shooting pool
at Rudyard's
pray like you're
sitting over soup
at Spanish Flowers
or pho at Mai's
steaming your glasses
pray like the kids
playing soccer
on the east side
or mutton busting
at the livestock show
pray like the runners
in Memorial Park
lacing them up
or the researchers
in the medical center
looking into microscopes
if you want
to pray for Houston
you have to pray
as quietly as
the Rothko Chapel
or Houston Zen Center
and you have to pray
as loudly as
the old scoreboard
at the Astrodome
after a José Cruz
home run
you have to pray
sitting under
a live oak tree
or standing next to
an azalea bloom
while your skin
clams in the heat
if you want to pray
for Houston
you have to pray
without pretense
this ain't Dallas
and in a neighborly way
as friends come out
to check on each other
in the rain
and those
who are far away
watch screens
and wipe our eyes
if you want to pray
for Houston
raise a bottle of Shiner
to the gray sky
and say that 130 mile an hour winds
and 9 trillion gallons of rain
are no match
for a city of such life
and diversity
you can fill up our bayou
but you will never rain
on our parade

- Jeremy Rutledge

Before The Flood


Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

- W.S. Merwin

Slipping Away


Nim the tide. Thole time.
Strangers knock on my door.
They say the ice-caps are melting.

Winter frozen waxen, white foam on high.
Crazed ice opens to dust-stone and mud.
Great halls splinter and fall into the sea,
dark sea rising.

All are slipping away.

Where goes the ice-walker white bear?
Where seal pups that blossom in spring?
Where are whales and the songs they sing?

They are slipping away.

Where feathered fliers that once filled the sky
the sky with sound of many wings thrumming?
Where is silver wolf’s night howl hunting?

Slipping away.

Alas for great halls toppled and gone.
Alas the tall, empty sky.
Nim the tide. Thole time.
Fold up the Earth.
Fugitive earth-stepper is slipping away.


- Patrice Warrender

Why Then Do We Not Despair?

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


- Anna Akhmatova
(translated by Stanley Kunitz)

Sometimes I really wonder when these poems were written. Many seem to come from today's headlines and yet I know they might be much older. would you consider adding the date ?

thanks
Joy aka Joybird

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Why Then Do We Not Despair?

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


- Anna Akhmatova
(translated by Stanley Kunitz)

---

Cupped Hands

Find a teacher. Preferably one that lives close by. Very close. Like inside. Build a container. You don't have to cut down a tree and then let the wood season nor purchase a lathe and then sign up for a wood turning class at the local community center. All you have to do is cup your hands. They become their own container.
Now whisper
a prayer.
Those cupped hands hold all the prayers you have yet to pray. If you do not know how to pray
Simply say to yourself:
thank you
A thousand or eight thousand times. If you wonder who you're praying to,
don't worry

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/wacco...2_08-29-02.png

everyone wonders this most of the time,
the rabbis,
the monks in the caves,
the devout catholic.
Please please please
Thank you thank you thank you
Or the other way around it doesn't matter which comes first.
Teacher
Container
Prayer or
Gratitude.

- Kristy Hellum

As Houston Drowns


As Houston drowns
in storm of such force
as never before recorded
there is thunderous silence
in the press as to its cause
& silence, too, about
the same happening
in Bangladesh, India, Nepal,
Pakistan, Kashmir
due to the same cause.
Science is not silent though;
calling bread bread & wine wine,
it names the cause of climate change:
the economics of empire
with its scorn for the Earth,
with its technology for profit
fueled by the remains
of ancient forests & the life they bore
distilled in the dark entrails
of the Great Mother that birthed us
& now punishes our arrogance
to possibly heal herself
with our demise.
& the scoundrel fools that govern us
tweet on.

- Rafael Jesús González 2017


A la vez que se ahoga Houston


A la vez que se ahoga Houston
en tormenta de tal fuerza
que nunca antes se registra
hay silencio aturdidor
en la prensa hacia su causa
y silencio también acerca de
lo mismo que pasa
en Bangladés, India, Nepal,
Pakistán, Cachemira
debido a la misma causa.
Pero la ciencia no se calla;
llamándole pan al pan y vino al vino
nombra la causa por el cambio climático:
La economía de imperio
con su desdén por la Tierra,
con su tecnología por lucro
alimentada por los restos
de bosques ancianos y la vida que daban
destilados en las entrañas oscuras
de la Gran Madre que nos dio nacer
y ahora castiga nuestra arrogancia
para posiblemente sanarse
con nuestra extinción.
Y los canallas imbéciles que nos gobiernan
siguen tuiteando.


© Rafael Jesús González 2017

At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina

A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy
receives my admission and points the way.
Here are gray jackets with holes in them,
red sashes with individual flourishes,
things soft as flesh. Someone sewed
the gold silk cord onto that gray sleeve
as if embellishments
could keep a man alive.

I have been reading War and Peace,
and so the particulars of combat
are on my mind--the shouts and groans
of men and boys, and the horses' cries
as they fall, astonished at what
has happened to them.
Blood on leaves,
blood on grass, on snow; extravagant
beauty of red. Smoke, dust of disturbed
earth; parch and burn.

Who would choose this for himself?
And yet the terrible machinery
waited in place. With psalters
in their breast pockets, and gloves
knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,
the men in gray hurled themselves
out of the trenches, and rushed against
blue. It was what both sides
agreed to do.

- Jane Kenyon

Street Musicians


One died, and the soul was wrenched out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

- John Ashbury
(July 28, 1927 - September 3, 2017)

Edges Of Roads

Of all country things, I suppose
I know best the edges of roads,
not berms where grass grows down to sides
of ditches, like on interstates,

or even where animals feed
at dusk, where cans congregate with
wrappers and the small dead are bounced
off below the cruising vultures.

I mean the trails behind the line
of woods and brush several yards off
where whatever watches can see
all that passes, not seen itself.

Hunters will know the place I mean
where on wet fall days they can move
silently, far enough from home,
but not in so deep they can get lost.

Lovers know it best, slipping off
on weekday afternoons or weekend
nights, pushing back convertible
tops, reaching for fragments of sky.

Seeing and not being seen are what
I want to say, not in hiding
but in league with fringes, knowing
what roads don't know of things that stay,

the way a child, who isn't lost, kneels
out of sight, urging with a straw
a beetle along, while through the town
anxious voices cry out his name.

- Trent Busch

For the Union Dead

“Delinquent Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

- Robert Lowell

Here is more on the 54th Regiment: African Americans led by Shaw fighting on the Union side. Also an image of the the plaque Lowell refers to. If you haven't seen this in person, be sure to visit it near the Statehouse next time you're in Boston: https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

For the Union Dead

...

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See:
Robert Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" and St. Gaudens' Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

For the Union Dead

...

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The Eagle Creek Fire

The air is still,
the sky white with smoke
from the Eagle Creek fire,
ash drops in tiny flakes,
the giant white oak
stands motionless and black,
silhouetted against the sky,
like a giant tombstone,
each dark leaf an inscription,
a memory of one of its
charred cousins,
devoured by
the fire.

- Bill Denham

Credo

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.

He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.

Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;

The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

- Robinson Jeffers

raveling travel

he was talking about how it was
that a spider
found on different islands
separated by infinite water


could get around
(undaunted by doubt)


a silk thread
swept up by wind


maybe like a song
past understanding catches the ear
as if we could hear
filaments of ourselves on the air


a strand of dying sunlight
pulling thread out of a star


a more rational creature
would not dare
such a survival strategy --


silk -- unraveling
oneself -- a form
of travel


- Gene Berson

A Word On Statistics

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
nearly all the rest.

Ready to help,
as long as it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four--well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life but things:
thirty
(although I would like to be wrong).

Doubled over in pain,
without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three,
sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred--
a figure that has never varied yet.


- Wislawa Szymborski
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

Dreamers

there's no emptiness
in the heart no sadness
at the start of youth
we are travelers in space
boundaries are made
jobs are scarce
the place we move to
with our parents early
is our place and we dream
of staying on here with you
winds of summer heat
winds of seasonal change
winds of American youth
here early here to stay
the stone of darkness
suddenly blazes
with magnificent light
stay on stay here

- Jack Crimmins

My Head is in My Heart


Not every day, but today,
When glancing in the mirror
By the front door,
I saw myself…
Differently…
I went back to take a look…again.
“Your head is in your heart,” I said.

I paused, I took it in, whatever that meant.
Maybe this will be my meditation for a day,
My Koan for a week?

This was a felt moment.
Sort of an Alice in Wonderland moment.
Maybe a Magritte question?

“My head is in my heart,” I said.
Thank God, it has a new place to call home!

- Eliza Weaver

Valley Fire

September 14, 2015


Sky’s so dry you could light a match
by winking at the clouds and
borer beetles burrow
insatiable selves
into the hearts
of firs. Meanwhile

the big leaf maples
burnish our autumn early this year.
They’re beautiful but
they’re more beautiful
when they’re wet,
says a friend, and
my mouth starts to water

yes,
this time of year,
everything’s better
when it’s wet.

And there’s a big hot hole in the land
up north and east that makes my
own life feel glorious full, and all
my dreams feel edgy. So

when those first real
raindrops fall (if they come
before the fire), and after
the kids are asleep,
I’m gonna
have sex
in the rain.

- Amy Robinson

As I crossed the bridge, a hairy hand came out.
"Stop, pay troll."
I gave him 5 euros. He put it not in his purse but in a jar.
"It's for the poor. They are very hungry," he said.
"This week Africa. Maybe next week your country."
He scratched. "When you get to the other side of the bridge, you get it back."
I looked, saw no one giving back. He saw me looking.

"Not THIS bridge," he said.

- Birrell Walsh

Pledge

Republic, your cool hands
On my schoolgirl shoulders.
Not sure what allegiances meant
Until the vows were held by heart,
By memory, by rote, by benign betrothal.
Republic, you were mine, I knew
Because of Mother’s religious pamphlets:
Lindsay for Mayor.
McGovern for President.
How to Register Voters.
I didn’t ever want to go to school
On Saturdays. The baby-sitter said
If Nixon won, I’d have to go. Me,
Your most cherished child bride.
I wanted a white communion dress
Like the ones the Catholic girls wore.
Republic, you know I wanted to play
Cards with Mother. Mother smoking
Marlboros, watching Watergate all week.
Citizen Mother all consumed at that confessional.
I liked the name Betsy Ross.

- Elizabeth Powell

wow.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

As I crossed the bridge, a hairy hand came out.
"Stop, pay troll."
I gave him 5 euros. He put it not in his purse but in a jar.
"It's for the poor. They are very hungry," he said.
"This week Africa. Maybe next week your country."
He scratched. "When you get to the other side of the bridge, you get it back."
I looked, saw no one giving back. He saw me looking.

"Not THIS bridge," he said.

- Birrell Walsh

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Two Kinds

There are two kinds of people in the world;
the ones with washers and dryers and the ones
who unfurl their slips at the laundromat, spread
saris and bed sheets by the river, hang
their checkered boxers on the line.

There are two: those who love Einstein
for his relativity and those who love his hair.
Those who relish words like infrastructure
and problematic, and those who like to ponder
life in the belly of the whale. For some,
invitations come as night birds; others get
a summons in the mail. These wander wet and
lonely; those soft-shoe in rhythm with the rain.

Two kinds: the tragic heroes and the understudies;
the bootleggers and the cobblers. Wolf-whisperers
and dogcatchers; shovellers of snow and readers
of the flake. There are those who run into the room
with a lit match, stopping to wonder what they came for,
and the ones who run in without the match.

- Prater Sereno

praise song

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.
i was ten.
i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.

- Lucille Clifton

Proud

Like those crazy Babylonians, who raised a tower
higher than their own I.Q.; so gigantic,
it could only have been built by God —
a fact that they forgot, until they fell,
in argument, apart, like so many unmortared
parts of speech. Babylon, remember?
They fell, and we grew up
to learn two languages — one for money,
and one for love; one for saying what we mean,
and one for hiding it. I'm thinking of my brother,
who lost his voice, and then his wife
because he was too proud to say, "Please, Don't Go."
That architect, my brother,
who sleeps now on his office couch,
twitching like a racedog in a business suit,
a dog who dreams he is so far ahead of all
the competition, he'll be impossible to catch.
I'm speaking of my brother, but I might as well
be talking of my enormously rich and arrogant
other relative, the United States — a country so goliath,
it casts a shadow over half the world;
so ambidextrous, it can lie and listen to itself
at once. And isn't that the story of the mind?
Which started as a little church,
with open doors,
but wound up as a fortress, with foot-thick walls
and a bristling defense. Somewhere inside,
we are lost, muttering about our enemies
and making up the truth. Truth is,
the self is a disease, a wound
which grows infected with the fear
that it will never have enough.
And egomania
is standing on a mountaintop
and sucking down great lungfuls
of a better quality of air
than what the common people get; it feels
like freedom and it tastes like truth;
you laugh, and every forty seconds, pledge
a new allegiance to yourself. And maybe
we will have to go on climbing to some
hopeless height, to some fantastic speed,
like Icarus the biggest day of his career.
Maybe there are pinnacles of ignorance,
altitudes of stupid, from which
recovery is impossible. I think
of my brother, who might have saved himself
with just a single word, however late and lame.
I think of my country,
which goes on talking.

- Tony Hoagland

Olam

Olam is another word
for the elusive Godot.
What will never come
is also the one place

that never goes,
where Lurianic sparks
are everywhere scattered
and waiting is wonderful

when always there is task,
the tikkun of taking tea
or telling tales. Being together
is the ordinary telos

worth our transience -
for the Lord is not our friend
as the Talmud warns,
but you have been to me,

and I sometimes
imperfectly to you,
in this realm of
sometimes passing.

- Zach Horvitz

Prayer and Cosmos


Three great rebbes wrestle with the hermeneutics of prayer:
does god pray, to whom, and what are those prayers?

The inquisitive Earthling asks the reflective moon about the prayers of the Sun.

From Rabbi Yochanan we learn that God prays; then
Rabbi Zutra ben Tobi reflects and relates god’s prayer only to discover that the Holy one received the same prayer from Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha.

Amazingly, the prayers of sun and moon overlap, so a major eclipse of sorts is unfolding from where we stand, here upon the earth.

Each planet plays it’s part, each Rebbe speaks his truth, and the Holy One keeps shining the one great light.

The three align perfectly as they hurtle through space and time.

From the earth we watch the moon block the sun and we cheer as it reaches totality.

“Look how the sun and moon are joined, offering the same prayer” we say in that magnificent moment.

What we and the Rabbis forget is that the whirling planets and their heartfelt prayers are always reaching for totality.

- Bruce Silverman

What the Storms Say

We have arrived. Yet
We are many and gather.
Still yelling at you
To turn, requiring you
To move, demanding
That you help each other.
We are screaming for you
To follow the spiral path
Of transformation. Our
Clouds swirl nine miles
High, we batter you so
You will learn your limits.
We barrel through your
Cities so you find out
You have gone too far.
You have forgotten too
Often how we are all
interconnected. Now
We remember. We
Are calling all of life
To acknowledge our
Indivisibility. Your
Souls are bound up
With us, the hurricanes,
The firestorms, and
The earthquakes.
We vibrate, we dance
In the wild rotations
Of celestial mirth.
Our souls follow
The beat, We are
Intrepid. We are
The spirits of change.
We call on you to
Reconsider your lives,
We are the hurricanes,
Insisting that you hurry,
Since there is little
Time before you and
Your circle of interrelated
Species will no longer
Be threatened, You will
Fall. To survive, you must
Keep watch and listen.
You run away to escape
The very thing you have
Created. Understand
This is not possible.
Safety is no where.
Extinction is upon us.
And when you return
From being with us,
What will you have?
Possessions are nothing.
We do not own one square
Inch of Mother Earth. She
Owns us, and she is out
Of patience. Trust not in
Material goods. Instead,
Rely on the wisdom of
The storms, the tsunami,
The floods, the tornados,
The lightning, the thunder.
See how we turn, We
Destroy, and we create.
We challenge you with
Your future, The time
Of the Great Migrations,
Of the Great Turnings,
Of the magical moments
Of mountains, The time
Of epiphany is upon you.
You have not lost everything.
What you have bought, what
You have so carefully counted
Has passed away. What you
Can hold is each other. What
You can cherish is diversity,
Multiplicity, all the forms
Of life. We order you to stand
Up and take notice. Our
Firestorms tell you to answer
Your grief with service. What
Service? To love one another,
To care, to give, to help. We
Are one. Something far greater
Than your selves are moving.
Something is being co-created.
You are like toddlers testing
Boundaries. You experience
Limits. All is not about comfort
Nor about your convenience.
Nor is it about what we own
Or what we can buy. All is
About our relationship to
Mother Earth and to and
Amongst her myriad of
Creatures. There is enough.
There is a way. The way is
Acknowledging suffering
As part of our path to
Redemption. The way
Of holding each other
And of committing
To the protection of
Sentient being to live
Together in peace and
In love. So we, the storm
Sprits are showing your
The price of all your lives
Is to recreate your lives.
You will run for your lives.
You will remember what
You thought your life was.
Then you will know exactly what
Life is worth. You are hunkered
Down under the storms. Your lives
belong to spirit and praise change.

- Patria Brown