Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

The Wind That Shakes The Barley

I sat within a valley green,
I sat there with my true love,
My sad heart strove the two between,
The old love and the new love, -
The old for her, the new that made
Me think of Ireland dearly,
While soft the wind blew down the glade
And shook the golden barley.

Twas hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
Twas harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen
I'll seek next morning early
And join the brave United Men!"
While soft winds shook the barley.

While sad I kissed away her tears,
My fond arms 'round her flinging,
The foeman's shot burst on our ears,
From out the wildwood ringing, -
A bullet pierced my true love's side,
In life's young spring so early,
And on my breast in blood she died
While soft winds shook the barley!

I bore her to the wildwood screen,
And many a summer blossom
I placed with branches thick and green
Above her gore-stain'd bosom
I wept and kissed her pale, pale cheek,
Then rushed o'er vale and far lea,
My vengeance on the foe to wreak,
While soft winds shook the barley!

But blood for blood without remorse,
I've ta'en at Oulart Hollow
And placed my true love's clay-cold corpse
Where I full soon will follow;
And round her grave I wander drear,
Noon, night and morning early,
With breaking heart whene'er I hear
The wind that shakes the barley!

- Robert Dwyer Joyce

Of Spouses and Fires

Half lose their husbands or their wives,
Far fewer lose homes to wildfires.
The first though worse no one survives.
Obstinate the second transpires.

No pain tops death of spouse or child,
Gloom bone cancer real or phantom
From home your hearth you’ve been exiled
Hymn of passing your sole anthem

What happens with the house rebuilt
Or another one discovered
Might fickle need produce new guilt
Front door unrecovered?

When might longing for what has passed
Transform to smoke none understands
It’s futile wisdom we’ve amassed
While gods do laugh at human plans.

- Ed Coletti

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

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Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing
under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,
and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment
my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars
and the soft rain –
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

- Mary Oliver

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

- James Wright

THE POWER OF NOW AND THEN


Now
And then
Are a spinning top:
A whirling blur of what
May have occurred way back
then in places like Egypt and at Mt. Sinai
But more recently Einstein and that quantum gang
Have informed us that now and then were one and the same.
You no doubt remember how Moses’ rod transformed into a snake
And soon after Hashem separated the Sea of reeds for the Hebrews
And so the sacred texts contain numerous moments where we see
That the stories in our hearts are not meant to be fact checked but
Are instead the ever-burning bushes illuminating one moment
That gets misconstrued as the retelling of a newspaper story
And even worse, an ironclad prediction of a cataclysm
When actually the biblical narrative circles around
The great mandala sparks of universal truths
That are forever living and rocking in the
Nestling arms of the great mysterious
Author Begetter and Originator
Of all beginnings middles
And endings of the one
Forever unfolding
And amazing
Now

Can you tell us who the poet is ?? Thanks....

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

THE POWER OF NOW AND THEN
...

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The Listening Buck


Sunday morning at the trail head,
in the east a sky kindling
over the shadowed hills.
We chat and walk in the half-light
holding hands, sometimes silent,
a kiss beside the way.
A day for beginnings and a long
climb into clear morning.

The path mounts over the rocky shoulder
of Tam’s west side. So still up here --
the clarity of the world and the sea.

We rest in a small glade--
some bread and cheese,
then out comes our book
and we read to each other.

A sound, a fallen twig, we turn to see
a buck has come quietly through the woods,
his ankles sunken in old leaves, ears piqued,
his neck stretched out to hear our words.


- Kevin Pryne

This Is Not Trivial


When prayers and good thoughts
are not enough


When a moment of silence and flag
half-mast seem irrelevant


When sending best wishes
When hoping
When contributing to a fundraising campaign
When signing a petition
When singing in a choir
lift your spirit only for a moment


When crying alone
In your kitchen
Serves no one, not even you


May you smile lovingly still
into the tired eyes of the man holding a cardboard sign
May a kindness be offered
on the passing plate
May we dare allow the sad sad news
that penetrates the fortress of longing
to melt like an altar candle
lit for one day of peace


May we remember
As a member
Of the human race
Fortunate enough
Healthy enough
Alive enough
To have this poem
Touching us
Right now


We can make every breath matter
We can forgive outrageously one more person today
We can look out from our doorway and say yes
I am here. I am here.
Is there any other way to fight?
This is not trivial:
LOVE


It matters


- Kristy Hellum

The Spring

(After Rilke)

Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!
Teacher was strict. We delighted in the white
Of the old man's beard, bright like the snow's:
Now we may ask which names are wrong, or right
For "blue," for "apple," for "ripe." She knows, she knows!
Lucky earth, let out of school, now you must play
Hide-and-seek with all the children every day:
You must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!
The happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things
You taught her: the word for "hope," and for "believe,"
Are still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.


- Delmore Schwartz

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The New Breed

for Emma Gonzalez and the other student activists

I see her on TV, screaming into a microphone.
Her head is shaved and she is beautiful
and seventeen, and her high school was just shot up,
she's had to walk by friends lying in their own blood,
her teacher bleeding out,
and she's my daughter, the one I never had,
and she's your daughter and everyone's daughter
and she's her own woman, in the fullness of her young fire,
calling bullshit on politicians who take money from the gun-makers.
Tears rain down her face but she doesn't stop shouting
she doesn't apologize she keeps calling them out,
all of them all of us
who didn't do enough to stop this thing.
And you can see the gray faces of those who have always held power
contort, utterly baffled
to face this new breed of young woman,
not silky, not compliant,
not caring if they call her a ten or a troll.
And she cries but she doesn't stop
yelling truth into the microphone,
though her voice is raw and shaking
and the Florida sun is molten brass.
I'm three thousand miles away, thinking how
Neruda said The blood of the children
ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Only now she is, they are
raising a fuss, shouting down the walls of Jericho,
and it's not that we road-weary elders
have been given the all-clear exactly,
but our shoulders do let down a little,
we breathe from a deeper place,
we say to each other,
Well, it looks like the baton
may be passing
to these next runners and they are
fleet as thought,
fiery as stars,
and we take another breath
and say to each other, The baton
has been passed, and we set off then
running hard behind them.

- Alison Luterman

Seventy Five
11 November 2017


And I think to myself, I’ll remember
this early dark and the rain; standing
before the toile-draped window, water
streaking the glass and dripping
from the low, curled iron; leaves of
wisteria vines, gold and green, trembling
in the November wind that ruffles
through the Cour Damoye.


I’ll recall Olivier, the coffee man
who calls bonjour as he brews his exotic
dark grinds in a small industrial shop
across the cobblestones.
And of course I can’t forget how
one leans full-bodied into the great iron
gate to open it at midnight, coming home
from salsa-dancing eating a hot dog.


I’ll remember every moment in its own way and
for it’s own reason or for no reason at all:
I’ll remember that on this Parisian lane
I was young one more time

- Audrey Ward

The Birthing

Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.

- Deborah Digges

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The Seder Dinner
For Sherrye on her 80th birthday

The emerald in the jeweler’s case is magnificent,
for it is rare;
the shimmering green dragonfly in the sun is more so,
for it is not.
Life constantly presents itself in a vast, breathtaking array
of ingredients; to make of it what we will.
A child wishes for an unending menu of desserts,
but the wise cook knows the balance of sweet and bitter,
rich and lean.
She works with what is given, eating each meal
as the feast that it is.
Unconcerned with whether the kitchen is clean
or if the pantry is full for tomorrow,
she savors each bite of the complex and rich stew that has
cooked over time, knowing that it nourishes her with a
deepening wisdom; a satisfying repast.
Live in fullness for all of your days.

- Alan Cohen

Passover

A sharing of

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something I embrace
through generations—
My Mother,
Mother’s Mother,
Mother before her, them,
handed down through our bones
our blood.

Tapping into a rich heritage
bonding with the old
creating anew,
I cook, clean,
come together within myself.
An inner expression
shared openly, lovingly
with those in my presence.

Passover is a gift
of history
passed on to you.

Welcome.

- Sherrie Lovler

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

- James Broughton

Seven Stanzas at Easter


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike

Pentecost


Passover and Easter: two moon linked sisters

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who long ago stopped speaking to one another:
linked to the fullness in our hearts
and the fullness of God’s grace.
The moon of Sister Miriam desires freedom –
to rescue her people from the cruelty of Pharaoh,
by the outstretched, mighty hand of Hashem:
a hand of salvation reaching down from heaven,
and passing through my nation,
and down through yours,
and then to each and every one of us – so may it be!
The moon of Mother Mary desires to give her light
so that each man and woman might know
the power of the resurrection,
and the soil of death that holds the seeds of rebirth within:
a resurrection reaching upward,
passing through all nations and up to God Almighty!
Two celebrations: two women: Miriam and Mary,
who don’t even know they have the same name –
one in Hebrew and one in Greek –
yet inexorably linked to a single full moon.
And then we each begin to count:
we both count to fifty –
beyond the forty days of Moses on Mt. Sinai
and Jesus in the wilderness.
We go beyond, one cycle further:
to fifty, Shavuot, the Pentecost.
Ours to the revelation of Torah at Sinai.
Yours to the revelation of the Holy Spirit.
Freedom and resurrection. Revelation and revelation.
Twelve tribes and twelve disciples.
One moon, two traditions.
Two covenants, One God.
Shavuot and Pentecost: two cousins
who have just begun to speak.
And King David is singing to us
from his tomb today:
“Teach us to count our days
that we may open our hearts to Your Wisdom.”
Some of us, thank God, are listening!

- Rabbi David Zaslow

Litany

For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they are dreamed and are dead.
from Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”

Enough to know.
They are dreamed.
And are dead.
The litany in my head
Utters their names
One by one.
Dead. Not dead.
Dreamed.
The beginning. Kneel down
On the cold stone floor.
The stone of the heart recalls first
Her name. Mary. The Grandmother,
The grandmother from Wales
Whose voice always took me to the lilt
Of Dylan Thomas.
Then the children: Marietta Walker,
First child of the young bride.
Donald, after her husband,
Who worked in the mine.
Carrie. Bill. Sam. Norval.
The family grew, boys
Following their father
Into the coal-dark days.
The child Kenneth,
The only one never to reach adulthood,
Adored by my mother, Maggie May.
(Maggie May, Margeret, Midge—
Alll names worn by my mother.)
And the youngest: Betty (Mary Elizabeth).
Elbert. Lucy Florence. Robert.
Twelve children and never an angry word
From the parents from Wales, from Scotland.
But the names go on. Chidren
Of their children. Cousins. Brothers.
My knees, on that ancient stone
Known to my memory, have no feeling.
Only telling.
The names
Come faster.
They are hard to say.
And now, in silence,
The stone. My heart. My love.
Say it.
Enough to know.
Dreamed.
And dead.

- Fran Claggett

Riddle



We do not recognize the body

Of Emmett Till. We do not know

The boy’s name nor the sound

Of his mother wailing. We have

Never heard a mother wailing.

We do not know the history

Of ourselves in this nation. We

Do not know the history of our

Selves on this planet because

We do not have to know

What we believe we own. We believe

We own your bodies but have no

Use for your tears. We destroy

The body that refuses use. We use

Maps we did not draw. We see

A sea so cross it. We see a moon

So land there. We love land so

Long as we can take it. Shhh. We

Can’t take that sound. What is

A mother wailing? We do not

Recognize music until we can

Sell it. We sell what cannot be

Bought. We buy silence. Let us

Help you. How much does it cost

To hold your breath underwater?

Wait. Wait. What are we? What?

What? What on Earth are we?


- Jericho Brown

The Formula

I'm going to let you in
On a secret: You’re not alone
Looking for the one, right way
The way where no mistake
Is possible, the place
Of no loss, no deluge
On the wedding day, no lies
Or rumors about one’s love life,
No anger, no sirens on a quiet
Night. Not the only one convinced
There is a right way.

Here's some suggestions we’ve followed:
Think positively, hold your hands
Just so. Arrange the room facing east.
Breathe. Exercise.
Speak your truth. Listen with
Intention. All this: a guarantee no
Disappointment will visit
And you’ll have what you want.

But what if it's all here? As is.
The mother's death, the best
Friend's decline, the son’s
Deceit and the day the snow
Fell silent in a picture-book
German park and you were in
no hurry.

- Rebecca del Rio

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

- Billy Collins

One Robe, One Bowl

My Life may appear melancholy,
But traveling through this world
I have entrusted myself to heaven.
In my sack, three sho of rice;
By the hearth, a bundle of firewood.
If someone asks what is the mark of enlightenment
or illusion,
I cannot say "wealth and honor are nothing but dust."
As the evening rain falls I sit in my hermitage
And stretch out both feet in answer.

If you speak delusions, everything becomes a delusion;
If you speak the truth, everything becomes the truth.
Outside the truth there is no delusion,
But outside delusion there is no special truth.
Followers of Buddha's Way!
Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your hearts.

- Ryokan
(translated by John Stevens)

Five Precepts On Happiness

1

Though your friends and family
will likely try
to save you from it,
yours is nobody else’s
business or responsibility.

2

You cannot cause,
manufacture or manipulate it.
It comes, if at all,
as gift to be received
with gratitude.

3

Hope to receive it
and prepare by giving away
what you least want to lose.
On this point
Jesus and Buddha dance.

4

Refuse to carry the burden
of maintaining it.
That’s unnecessary baggage,
will betroth you
to a boulder and a hill.

5

If you receive some,
scatter it like seed.
Sharing assures preservation.
As with manna,
held tight, it rots.

- Bonnie Thurston

Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
- William Carlos Williams

The Call

Women in black picked up their violins
To play, backs turned to the mirror.
The wind died as it does on the best days
To hear better their dark music.
But almost at once, seized by a vast amnesia,
The violins slumped in the women’s arms
Like naked children fallen asleep
Among the trees.
Nothing it seemed could ever again stir
The motionless bows, the violins of marble,
And it was then that in the depths of sleep
Someone breathed to me: “You alone can do it,
Come immediately.”

- Jules Supervielle
(translated by Geoffrey Gardner)

Benediction

Dreaming in the last land of dementia,
Torso stiff, limbs frozen,
Steve kneeling by your side
Arranging long now unbending legs
Into the chair Mimi chose
To hold inarticulate love,
Your rigid arm reached out in blessing.
Three times you touched his head.
“Son", you said.

- Ruah Bull

The Last Dog In The World

The last dog in the world

stands outside the dismantled city

A forest of buildings falls down
inside him. When he sleeps

he dreams of forests, but awake
he can’t remember leaves

or the soft sound
that floated down from above
preceding the beneficial
manifestation of food.

Or who it was
who was always
with him.

The last dog in the world
is afraid to regard his tail.

Can’t smell the earth anymore

since all scents left by other
have evaporated. And all
others have evaporated.

For these reasons it’s difficult

for the last dog
to travel anywhere.

Instead he curls up in the corner
of a former gas station, under a pile

of leaflets declaring the End
of the World. Or under the other

leaflets arguing that
The World Will Go On, the world
will always go on. The first

pile of leaflets, apparently,
has won. But the dog doesn’t
know this. What’s paper to him, anyway?

What are days? Just him and
the left-over spiders.
Him and the rusted hinges
and oil refineries and cars stopped

in their tracks on the empty
highways.

How long can a last dog
live like this? The world goes

on and on.

- Sarah Messer

In Black
(written when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003)

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs), I put on black.

I folded away red, yellow, rage, and
Hope. I tucked greens, blues, anticipation
And desire in a neat corner
And I put on black.

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs) I stacked olive, tan,
Quietude and rest in the cabinet.
And I put on black.

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs) I watched orange
Shower up in spectacular sparks like
A desert bonfire. I put away my scarves, silver bracelets,
Amulets and laughter.
And I put on black.

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs,) I felt
The air being sucked out of me
In great gulps of teal, fuchsia, pained
Shades of purple. I felt the air wheeling over as
I put on black.

The day we started bombing (we because no matter
How I refused, they used my name anyway)
I folded up joy, like a Bedouins tent, bright,
Fringed and billowing and put on black.


- Rebecca del Rio

Turn your words prophet


Take your words prophet and turn them
to seed
press them
into the palm
of the earth
give each one
a finger of light
let them rest
as long as they need

Take your words prophet and turn them
to softly falling rain
on the Sierra Nevadas
send them
rushing down
dusty valleys
filling dry wells
and parched imaginations

Take you words prophet and turn them
to music
join the love song
of the phoenix
strike fire from
the heart of man*
till the last notes
fade in a trail of smoke

Take your words prophet and turn them
to ears
listen, listen now
to the human
mind feeling
its way back
to the body

Take your words prophet and
let them hang
in the wind
blowing this way
and that
clean white
sheets on a line

Take your silence prophet and throw it
wildly
to the end
of time
leaving nothing
but the echo
of breaking
waves


*’Music should strike fire from the heart of man,…………..…’ Ludwig van Beethoven

- Rachel Parry

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

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You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

Clichés of Our Times

I am not so blessed or so not blessed, being a lapsed
Unitarian who believes only in oaks and sunlight,
nor am I honored, a once-bright thought now sunk
into meaninglessness on everyone’s lips, one of so many


clichés of our times, and I certainly don’t deserve anything,
good or bad, a ridiculous notion, as if we could bend fate
in our own hands. What happens is merely what happens.
We manufacture the stories after, to make proper sense


of the random world, but they confer blame on the innocent,
by and large they serve us ill. All that counts in the end
is practice, letting whatever come closer in, sitting beside
those trusted friends: the delightful and the unacceptable,


busted fan belt in evening traffic, the diagnosis, that sudden,
unexpected, dreamed-of poetry prize, the lottery win.

- Molly Fisk

The Damnedest Finest Ruins



Put me somewhere west of East Street where there's nothin' left but dust,

Where the lads are all a hustlin' and where everything's gone bust,

Where the buildin's that are standin' sort of blink and blindly stare

At the damndest finest ruins ever gazed on anywhere.


Bully ruins - bricks and wall - through the night I've heard you call

Sort of sorry for each other cause you had to burn and fall.

From the Ferries to Van Ness you're a God-forsaken mess,

But the damndest finest ruins - nothin' more or nothin' less.


The strangers who come rubberin' and a huntin' souvenirs,

The fools they try to tell us it will take a million years

Before we can get started, so why don't we come and live

And build our homes and factories upon land they've got to give.


"Got to give"! why, on my soul, I would rather bore a hole

And live right in the ashes than even move to Oakland's mole,

If they'd all give me my pick of their buildin's proud and slick

In the damndest finest ruins still I'd rather be a brick!

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

My father's family lived in San Francisco when the earthquake struck; my grandfather ran a bar on Union and Laguna Streets in Cow Hollow. Not long after the quake, while the fire was gathering strength,a rumor began to circulate that the entire San Francisco peninsula was going to sink into the ocean. That was enough for the Jacopettis; they loaded up their horse and wagon and headed for the Ferry Terminal. Upon arriving, they found the last ferry was full, so my grandfather bribed the ticket sellers and got on board. They reached Oakland, and camped in the hills along with many other San Franciscans and watched the fire, which appeared to be engulfing the entire city.

Many years later, thinking of the Quake and Fire in '06 and my father being born in '07, I asked him if he had possibly been conceived at the camp in the Oakland hills. He smiled, appearing a little embarrassed, and said, "Well, that's what they always used to tell me."

I grew up in San Francisco 1938 (2 years old when we moved from Beach Street in the Marina to Green and Laguna, one block above Granpa's tavern [he subsequently had a bar and restaurant at #1 Columbus Avenue, in North Beach.]) to 1955, when I left home to seek fun and adventure (found quite a bit of both.) That Green and Laguna house, by the way, was built in 1891, and survived the catastrophe.

Roland

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Damnedest Finest Ruins
...

(After the San Francisco earthquake April 18, 1906)

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In The Absence Of Bliss

Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv

The roasting alive of rabbis
in the ardor of the Crusades
went unremarked in Europe from
the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,
open without prerequisite
when I was an undergraduate.

While reciting the Sh’ma in full
expectation that their souls
would waft up to the bosom
of the Almighty the rabbis burned,
pious past the humming extremes
of pain. And their loved ones with them.
Whole communities tortured and set aflame
in Christ’s name
while chanting Hear, O Israel.

Why?
Why couldn’t the rabbis recant,
kiss the Cross, pretend?
Is God so simple that He can’t
sort out real from sham?
Did He want
these fanatic autos-da-fé, admire
the eyeballs popping,
the corpses shrinking in the fire?

We live in an orderly
universe of discoverable laws,
writes an intelligent alumna
in Harvard Magazine.
Bliss is belief,
agnostics always say
a little condescendingly
as befits mandarins who function
on a higher moral plane.

Consider our contemporary
Muslim kamikazes
hurling their explosives-
packed trucks through barriers.
Isn’t it all the same?
They too die cherishing the fond
certitude of a better life beyond.

We walk away from twenty-two
graphic centuries of kill-the-jew
and hail, of all things, a Mercedes
taxi. The driver is Yemeni,
loves rock music and hangs
each son’s picture—three so far—
on tassels from his rearview mirror.

I do not tell him that in Yemen
Jewish men, like women, were forbidden
to ride their donkeys astride,
having just seen this humiliation
illustrated on the Museum screen.

When his parents came
to the Promised Land, they entered
the belly of an enormous
silver bird, not knowing whether
they would live or die.
No matter. As it was written,
the Messiah had drawn nigh.

I do not ask, who tied
the leaping ram inside the thicket?
Who polished, then blighted the apple?
Who loosed pigs in the Temple,
set tribe against tribe
and nailed man in His pocket?

But ask myself, what would
I die for and reciting what?
Not for Yahweh, Allah, Christ,
those patriarchal fists
in the face. But would
I die to save a child?
Rescue my lover? Would
I run into the fiery barn
to release animals,
singed and panicked, from their stalls?

Bliss is belief, but where’s
the higher moral plane I roost on?
This narrow plank given to splinters.
No answers. Only questions.

- Maxine Kumin

I Don't Miss It

But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

- Tracy K. Smith
(Tracy K. Smith is the United States Poet Laureate)

Love This Miraculous World

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

- Wendell Berry

I have a propensity for adding images to poems, please don't be annoyed.
The photo background image is by: André Kértesz

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

- Dylan Thomas

Diving into the Wreck


1.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

2.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

3.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

4.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

5.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenelated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.


6.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

7.

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

- Adrienne Rich

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

- Yehuda Amichai


(Translation by Chana Bloch, in This Same Sky, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye)

The Carmel River

The Carmel is a lovely little river.
It isn’t very long
but in its course
it has everything a river should have.

It rises in the mountains,
and tumbles down a while,
runs through shallows,
is dammed to make a lake,

spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders,
wanders lazily under sycamores,
spills into pools where trout live,
drops in against banks where crayfish live.

In the winter it becomes a torrent,
a mean little fierce river,
and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in
and for fishermen to wander in.

Frogs blink from its banks
and the deep ferns grow beside it.

Deer and foxes come to drink from it,
secretly in the morning and evening,
and now and then a mountain lion
crouched flat laps its water.

The farms of the rich little valley
back up to the river
and take its water
for the orchards and the vegetables.

The quail call beside it
and the wild doves
come whistling in at dusk.
Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs.

It’s everything a river should be.

- John Steinbeck
(From “Cannery Row”)

earthworm


they intertwine our loving with our death,
these earthworms mating with both sides of love.
a gentle rain has coaxed them here above
their buried realm. they squirm in pungent breath
of earthen, dark decay. they take their time.
they hold affection long as if too sweet
to rush. when their endearment is complete,
i blush to see them ease through leaf and grime—
it’s not for science that i watch, but joy.
these wizards of fertility for dirt
are connoisseurs of sex as well as rot.
while mending blessed humus we destroy,
they might become a meal for snake or bird
and teach profound acceptance of our lot.

- Sandy Eastoak

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The Horse

I cannot leave the image of the horse in the water,
the horse thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean
on a moonlit night, the horse following

the slow-moving ship, eyes fixed
on that only other object on the water. It did not
ask to come. It did not willingly leave

the field where it ran, its mane rising up in waves
with each step. It did not like the stinging
in its eyes. The taste of salt no longer

brought pleasure. Its nostrils flared and its body
grew heavier. Around it, long after the ship disappeared,
circles were reaching in every direction, one outside the other.


- Matthew J. Spireng

The sad word here is 'thrown'.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Horse

I cannot leave the image of the horse in the water,
the horse thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean
on a moonlit night, the horse following...

---

Extra, Extra

All hail the yellow flag of spring waving on the earth,
the fields striking light against the bell of the sky
in one triumphant peal announcing revolution.
Sing hail to the marching band in its rows of thousands,
hail to the buds on the branches like droplets of milk
about to bloom in a cup of black tea. Hail breakfast.

All praise to weeds, to fennel, thistle, miner's lettuce,
to foxtail and rattlesnake grass, horseradish, duckweed,
to moss and lichen, to goldenback fern. Praise outlaws.
Praise their persistence and their disregard for safety,
the way they pass through fences as if through open doors.
Praise to the uncountable numbers of their beauty.

And thanks for nothing. Thank you for this embarrassment
of useless gifts, this bright paper covering the box
of earth. Thank you for the fecund grave, the open mouth
of the river in constant, irresponsible flood.
Thanks for all that goes to waste, unasked for, unwanted:
this love, in such profusion, that does not care for us.

- Yosha Bourgea

the new world

in the hot months
the maps are singing
of places beyond the everyday


and I see
Columbus
packing his bags with hopes
and diseases
leaving for a world
that he didn’t want to find

how often we’ve headed
for the new world
finding everything
the maps had promised:
a plotted landscape
a measured sea

these maps have made the world flat
do not use them

they can show us
all there is
but there are no roads
to where we have to go

- Lynn Mally

What I Teach 3rd Graders

I teach how to shake hands
and raise hands
and clap hands
to appreciate.
How to listen
how to wait
how to hold a pencil
(not a gun).

I teach that every sentence
has a subject
(The man)
and a predicate
(is shooting children)
and some have a prepositional phrase
(in their classroom.)
I teach them to pause
at a comma, to stop
at a period
and a ? means you are asking
(Why? Why? Why?)

I teach them to multiply
legs on dogs
fingers on hands
(not shootings in schools),
and how in subtraction you start
with the bigger number
and when you’re done taking away
you have less.
(17 less in Parkdale, 15 less in Columbine, 27 less in Sandy Hook.)

I teach about places
(unmarred
by children murdered at school),
the lives of people
who have made a difference
(not a massacre),
how water can be absorbed
or repelled
(like blood on linoleum)
and that some words, like repel,
mean more than one thing.

I teach them to walk quietly
in a line when the fire alarm sounds,
to duck and cover
until the earth stops shaking,
and to lay on the floor
(like fish in a barrel)
if a bad man comes.

What I don’t tell them
is in that hellish haze
of gunfire and screams
I plan to toss them like ragdolls
behind bookshelves,
stack them like cordwood
behind cubbies,
that my only calculation
will be how many can I save,
how many will I leave to die?

So when I rescue
a spider from the sink
scoop it into a paper cup
set it down among green leaves,
they breathe as one, relieved,
because I’ve taught them
it’s wrong to kill
small creatures.

- Lisa Shulman

In The Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well things
Lean on each other, how the bees work,
The fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high, then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
Changing, what has no head or arms
Or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
Caught on this earth, visit
The old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
Be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
Whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

- Robert Bly

(Slusser Rd. off of River Rd. —Fall of 2017)

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

In The Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well things
Lean on each other, how the bees work,
The fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high, then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
Changing, what has no head or arms
Or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
Caught on this earth, visit
The old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
Be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
Whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

- Robert Bly

---

Edge of the Wild

It ends and starts with intention, for all beginnings are ends.

Invaluable, it doesn’t count for much, I know, but I try. Hard.

There are ways to repeat this, a chorus of crows, a fluttering of sound.

I might get used to it, after some time, but I’ll often be on edge, pinfooted.

It would look like spying, but see here, what I’ve quietly done.

Love and love and more love: evergreen,

Warm, belly-full; cool, satiated, a wilding of grin, romp and ballad.

If all my fears went driving, all stirrings travelled on,

I’d still be here, finishing things; planted and pruning.

There is no gateway; no golden harp.

I am in need, I am in want, I am in hope.

It isn’t a secret, a sheltered hideaway or a silent hurt.

I am admiring the view now, seeing all that it is full and plenty,

And wanting it for myself, closing the distance of one jealousy to another.

Forever; wild and steaming, rioting and skimming the sky with resilience

I am mostly staring at stars, backlit by moonlight.

Most nights, I wonder, half-handedly curious, yet struck with ebbing

Let me, help me to see the worth, the riches, the flourish under the hibernating.

I am so afraid of being troubled and alone at the end of this world,

At the start of whatever is next.

- Leah Umansky

Two Kinds Of People

We all get our signals
mixed up once in awhile,
moving forward
on the same part
of the sidewalk
as someone
coming toward us,
then stopping
before collision
and engaging in
a little foot-dance.
Sometimes we even
repeat the whole business,
having both decided
to switch to
the same
new path.
Finally, untangled,
we walk on.
Here Is where we see
two kinds of people.
Most look us
in the eye
with a smile,
as if to say,
“Nice dancing with you!”
A few, though,
walk on
with no hint
of recognition
or camaraderie.
It's chilling
to realize
the truth:
"for this person,
I was nothing
but a brief
obstacle to progress."

- Max Reif

El Palatero

His fingers stop ringing the string of small brass bells and he peddles harder and faster as he pulls out of a lazy neighborhood street and onto the avenue of honking horns and screeching tires. Cars speed past this mobile vendor, some a little too close for comfort drawing concerned or vexed glances from harried drivers.

He offers, paletas; frozen fruit bars of coconut, strawberry, tamarind, watermelon. How many can he possibly sell today; enough to feed his family? The back of his shirt is dark with sweat, but one must do what one must to meet his obligations; si no trabajes no comes (if you don’t work, you don’t eat.)

A sparrow who lives this adage pulls a worm from out of a lawn where cats are known to dwell – a risky business indeed. He flies upward into a street tree eyeing the man who peddles the large insulated box on bicycle wheels passing below.

El Paletero relaxes his tempo as he rides onto another neighborhood street and like a maestro he begins working his bells, hoping to lure those with a sweet tooth and a little extra to spend.

The sparrow bounces branch to branch until he is at his nest then places bits of today’s earnings into anxious little beaks as children line up at the curb hopping with excitement clutching coins in their small hands.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

Safety Within

While staring at screens
We lose the means
To observe the fact that we make our own scenes

I definitely get
That it makes you upset
Taking in this unnatural density yet

It's not just the teens
Or even the 'tweens
Robots of all ages walk like Zombeings

But don't forget
It's a filter you set
Resist it and it's resistance you'll get

So here's the truth
This world is uncouth
Being in it at times is pulling a tooth

Don't drop gaze to screen-in
It won't give you mean-in
That comes from relations so lift up that chin

And look around
Without defensive frown
You find security, even in this old town

Clogging up visual field
Deep security won't yield
Nor blasting music as an auditory shield

the deal is that we all need some quiet

if not the world can feel like a riot

like a neverending arms race don't try it

it can be hard to feel loved and secure

in a dog-eat-dog world I'm sure

but if you find the courage I tell you it's pure

we were made to love and cooperate

no matter how much the news spreads hate

may you find you true self and a way to feel great.

- Ben Fisher

Listening


Listening to trees.

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

“We’ve been listening,
contentedly,
as you’ve been listening
to others,
to Spirit's voice,
to Grandpa Fire,
to your hilltop Oak.

“And remember
the log that spoke to you
in Wiricuta
as you placed it
on Grandpa Fire.

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

“Everything,
of course,
has a voice.”

- Trout Black

The Rented Lakes Of My Childhood

I remember the lakes of my Michigan
childhood. Here they are called ponds.
Lakes belonged to summer, two-week
vacations that my father was granted by
Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.

Never mind the dishes with spiderweb
cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce
pans, the crusted black frying pans.
Never mind the mattresses shaped
like the letter V. Old jangling springs.

Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings
that leaked. The lakes were mysteries
of sand and filmy weeds and minnows
flickering through my fingers. I rowed
into freedom. Alone on the water

that freckled into small ripples,
that raised its hackles in storms,
that lay glassy at twilight reflecting
the sunset then sucking up the dark,
I was unobserved as the quiet doe

coming with her fauns to drink
on the opposite shore. I let the row-
boat drift as the current pleased, lying
faceup like a photographer's plate
the rising moon turned to a ghost.

And though the voices called me
back to the rented space we shared
I was sure I left my real self there—
a tiny black pupil in the immense
eye of a silver pool of silence.

- Marge Piercy

Thank You for Waiting

At this moment in time we'd like to invite
First Class passengers only to board the aircraft.

Thank you for waiting. We now extend our invitation
to Exclusive, Superior, Privilege and Excelsior members,
followed by Triple, Double and Single Platinum members,
followed by Gold and Silver Card members,
followed by Pearl and Coral Club members.
Military personnel in uniform may also board at this time.

Thank you for waiting. We now invite
Bronze Alliance members and passengers enrolled
in our Rare Earth Metals Points and Reward Scheme
to come forward, and thank you for waiting.

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- Simon Armitage

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver

The Bad Old Days

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
Suppers of fried potatoes and
Fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
Of my misery I felt rising
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is
Everywhere, you don’t have to
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.

- Kenneth Rexroth

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.

- Alison Luterman

Great one. Thanks!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Invisible Work...

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:heart:

This is one of those poems in which I feel the author was able to seize a moment when the jugular vein pulse of the world he saw "spoke" to him and confessed all...and he dutifully put it all down. One of those moments any writer wants to be able to have EVERY moment!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Bad Old Days

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
Suppers of fried potatoes and
Fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
Of my misery I felt rising
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is
Everywhere, you don’t have to
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.

- Kenneth Rexroth

---

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.



- Billy Collins

Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps

My mother who isn't anyone's
just her own intact and yearning
self complete as a birch tree
sits on the tenement steps.

She is awkwardly lovely, her face
pure as a single trill perfectly
prolonged on a violin, yet she
knows the camera sees her

and she arranges her body
like a flower in a vase to be
displayed, admired she hopes.
She longs to be luminous

and visible, to shine in the eyes
of it must be a handsome man,
who will carry her away--and he
will into poverty and an abortion

but not yet. Now she drapes
her best, her only good dress
inherited from her sister who dances
on the stage, around her legs

that she does not like
and leans a little forward
because she does like her breasts.
How she wants love to bathe

her in honeyed light lifting her
up through smoky clouds clamped
on the Pittsburgh slum. Blessed
are we who cannot know

what will come to us,
our upturned faces following
through the sky
the sun of love.

- Marge Piercy

I Come From There

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.


I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland...

- Mahmoud Darwish

Half-and-Half

You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can't love
anyone else. Says he.

At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he's sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across face, of date-stuffed' mamool.

This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren't fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.

A woman opens a window -- here and here and here
placing a vase of blue flowers,
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Earth Prayer

O Endless Creator, Force of Life, Seat of the Unconscious, Dharma,
Atman, Ra, Qalb, Dear Center of our Love, Christlight, Yahweh, Allah,
Mawu, Mother of the Universe…

Let us, when swimming with the stream, become the stream…
Let us, when moving with the music, become the music…
Let us, when rocking the wounded, become the suffering..

Let us live deep enough till there is only one direction…
and slow enough till there is only the beginning of time…
and loud enough in our hearts till there is no need to speak…

Let us live for the grace beneath all we want,
let us see it in everything and everyone,
till we admit to the mystery that when I look deep enough into you,
I find me,
and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart,
you recognize it as your secret, which you thought no one else knew…

O let us embrace that unexpected moment of unity as the atom of God…
Let us have the courage to hold each other when we break and worship what unfolds…

O nameless spirit that is not done with us,
let us love without a net beyond the fear of death
until the speck of peace we guard so well becomes the world…

- Mark Nepo

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

- Richard Brautigan

Written in 1967!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace...

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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

New Life


Open the gate less gate
look inside and call your name
welcome whoever answers
leave outside any blame.


Remember, you are never the same
differences make the day, it falls in the grain
it’s all love . . . no shame — no gambit, no fray
no giants or monsters to tame
wear your smile
you’ll like this new game.


Get over the buzz and follow
a continuous natural flow
new weave, tight mesh
new form this exploration
experience all generations
different understanding of equations
the cleansing of aberrations.


Enter . . . join the celebration
relax and hang with trend
it’s a something that goes forever
new life — every cycle
no beginning, no end


- jayro dyer

How She Works
for Donna


She is Persephone with no
Demeter to rescue her. Above
is always winter. Inside the cave
she calls her office,
she is a schizophrenic talking
to the voices that enter her head.
Disembodied voices chatter in her ears,
she chats to the bodiless. Her disembodied
voice climbs into their ears wherever
they might be in their caves
they call offices.


She is hungry for more
than pomegrantes, craves poetry,
oysters and ripe stuffed olives.


At night she dreams
if she sleeps.
She dreams of something she cannot
imagine and so it has no name.
Tight ripe buds push like crowning
babies birthing into bright, electric air.
Thin shoots of palest green
wiggle and thrust through dark, amazed
earth. Because she is blind
she cannot name the colors. There are
so many, no one could name them.


She dreams of Spring.
She dreams of breathing.
She dreams her mother is searching for her.


- Rebecca del Rio

More than the Morning

It’s more than the morning we must wake up to
The birds have been singing for hours in our dreams.
Let us not be too sleepy to remember the countless blessings
Waiting to unfold in a day remembered with Grace.


Let us not forget to love,
To smile, to breathe the simple truth
That all life’s precious configurations
Are designed to guide us to our awakening.


What a paradox that we must sleep to dream
And awaken to fulfill our dreams.
What a paradox that we must die to full live,
Give to receive, and empty to fill up again.


Even our longing is a blessing,
For it carries the wind across the sea;
And stirs the ocean of the soul
Into the creative matrix of wonder.

- Anodea Judith

What Women Are Made Of


We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.

Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;

we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch,

sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root

and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar

and lobe. We are hippocampus and exposed nerve

and cornea. Areola, pigment, melanin, and nails.

Varicose. Cellulite. Divining rod. Sinew and tissue,

saliva and silt. We are blood and salt, clay and aquifer.

We are breath and flame and stratosphere. Palimpsest

and bibelot and cloisonné fine lines. Marigold, hydrangea,

and dimple. Nightlight, satellite, and stubble. We are

pinnacle, plummet, dark circles, and dark matter.

A constellation of freckles and specters and miracles

and lashes. Both bent and erect, we are all give

and give back. We are volta and girder. Make an incision

in our nectary and Painted Ladies sail forth, riding the back

of a warm wind, plumed with love and things like love.

Crack us down to the marrow, and you may find us full

of cicada husks and sand dollars and salted maple taffy

weary of welding together our daydreams. All sweet tea,

razor blades, carbon, and patchwork quilts of Good God!

and Lord have mercy! Our hands remember how to turn

the earth before we do. Our intestinal fortitude? Cumulonimbus

streaked with saffron light. Our foundation? Not in our limbs

or hips; this comes first as an amen, a hallelujah, a suckling,

swaddled psalm sung at the cosmos’s breast. You want to

know what women are made of? Open wide and find out.


- Bianca Lynne Springs

"swaddled psalm sung at the cosmos's breast"....some wordsmith!

Hmm To Time


Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.


And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.


Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.


Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.


- Ursula K. Le Guin

“Never Apologize, Never Explain"


On the contrary, always apologize and explain,
in the terror-white veracity, down to the essence bone,
tenaciously follow the long road. Be
capable and Voltairean, discreet of form and substance, tell it
like it is, don't gloss over
in silent splendor.


Give the unattractive facts. But they won't be
that insipid (arrears of heavenly bodies).
And if you have to polish up
the contemptible gaff, give it all you've got—seriously,
don't swindle and pretend the sky
didn't fall in.


But dole out the mathematics, saviors of the gut.
Inching without propaganda the longhand
of dream. Even insult the host who
just wanted to play the game. Apologize in sample color,
if you loved something, say it. If kept
under your hat,


let the fallacies represent you.
From whatever Acropolis of stress, bat with
that genuine non-expurgation, the angel of bottomless pits.
Versatility and science; right the wrongs you know,
and do it with wholeheartedness. In fundamentals
so brash, or like a glass


of water.


- Jane Mayhall

Counting on Sunday

He didn't have his
Heart in his sermon.
If he did, it didn't
Show up in any enthusiasm
In his voice.
And I didn't have
My restless soul
In church.
If I did, I wouldn't
Have counted
The 823 bricks
On the wall.
Outside one
Of the 48
Window panes
Behind the 16
White shutters
That helped shade
The sunlight
Off the 11 crosses,
2brass, 4 on cloth,
1 on a plaque that's nailed
To the rail that leads
To the wooden one
That's carved on the altar
Just left of the
Wooden one that holds
The page numbers
That face
The one in concrete
On the baptismal font
That stands beside
The organist
Who is married
To the preacher who
Has a silver one
Hanging around his neck
As he speaks to
10 women, 8 men
And 4 children
Who sit in
21pews
That hold 161
Hymn books
Under 78 electric candles
That shine on
5 doorknobs
And 2 flags
That stand
Over 11 eyeglasses,
7 necklaces,
2 flower arrangements,
1 hair bow,
1 bow tie,
1 silver barrette,
And a sermon
In a pear tree.

- Margaret Vaughn
(poet laureate of Tennessee)

Singularity


(after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No
them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home

- Marie Howe

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

- Jane Hirshfield

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper


At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.

Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.

- Martin Espada

The Tree of Knowledge


The hastily assembled angel saw
One thing was like another thing and that
Thing like another everything depend-
ed on how high it was the place you saw


Things from and he had seen the Earth from where
A human couldn’t see the Earth and could-
n’t tell most human things apart and though
He hadn’t ever really understood


His job he knew it had to do with seeing
And what he saw was everything would come
Together at the same time everything
Would fall apart and that was humans thinking


The world was meant for them and other things
Were accidental or were decora-
tions meant for them and therefore purposeful
That humans thought that God had told them so


And what the hastily assembled angel
Thought was that probably God had said the same thing
To every living thing on Earth and on-
ly stopped when one said Really back but then


Again the hastily assembled angel
Couldn’t tell human things apart and maybe
That Really mattered what would he have heard
Holy or maybe Folly or maybe Kill me


- Shane McCrae

Old Timer's Day


When the tall puffy
figure wearing number
nine starts
late for the fly ball,
laboring forward
like a lame truckhorse
startled by a gartersnake,
this old fellow
whose body we remember
as sleek and nervous
as a filly's,


and barely catches it
in his glove's
tip, we rise
and applaud weeping:
On a green field
we observe the ruin
of even the bravest
body, as Odysseus
wept to glimpse
among shades the shadow
of Achilles.





- Donald Hall

Cello


When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, sheering away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down,
moaning in wind, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.


- Dorianne Laux

Destruction

First of all do you remember the way a bear goes through
a cabin when nobody is home? He goes through
the front door. I mean he really goes through it. Then
he takes the cupboard off the wall and eats a can of lard.

He eats all the apples, limes, dates, bottled decaffeinated
coffee, and 35 pounds of granola. The asparagus soup cans
fall to the floor. Yum! He chomps up Norwegian crackers
stashed for the winter. And the bouillon, salt, pepper,
paprika, garlic, onions, potatoes.

He rips the Green Tara
poster from the wall. Tries the Coleman Mustard. Spills
the ink, tracks in the flour. Goes up stairs and takes
a shit. Rips open the water bed, eats the incense and
drinks the perfume. Knocks over the Japanese tansu
and the Persian miniature of a man on horseback watching
a woman bathing.

Knocks Shelter, Whole Earth Catalogue,
Planet Drum, Northern Mists, Truck Tracks, and
Women's Sports into the oozing water bed mess.

He goes down stairs and out the back wall. He keeps on going
for a long way and finds a good cave to sleep it all off.
Luckily he ate the whole medicine cabinet, including stash
of LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin, Amanita, Benzedrine, Valium
and aspirin.

- Joanne Kyger

Drummers


Unbeknownst to biblical scholars, behind the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, stood drummers. Now bear with this outrageous claim for a moment and consider the notion that

Drummers draw vertical lines of protection around all who walk the earth and stand upon its spinning firmament, acting as human surrogates for the hands of deities. That

Drummers can’t be understood by critics but require shaman and priests to comprehend the workings of rhythm and sound. That

Drummers, with Orphic metaphor, call the sun to rise and conduct late afternoon shadows toward evening’s obsidian crypts. That

Drummers, with weathered hands dance their dream-drumming riffs on mud, clay pots, tree trunks and goatskins. That

Drummers guide the sacred breathing itself and the coursing of blood through our veins for this sprint of a lifetime. That

Drummers lurk behind trees and spark the cosmic movin’ and
groovin,’ rockin’ and a reelin,’ injecting sparks into human clay

so friends and lovers will play and pray, sanctified with the wine
and bread of Rumba, Jazz, Samba, and Salsa, Flamenco,

Fandango and the sensuous Tango, reminding us that we swing in
a universe that pulses, gyrates, beats and palpitates the yearning

heart with the one vibration: be it final ending or primal start.

- Bruce Silverman

The Buttonhook


President Roosevelt, touring Ellis Island
in 1906, watched the people from steerage
line up for their six-second physical.

Might not, he wondered aloud, the ungloved handling
of aliens who were ill infect the healthy?
Yet for years more it was done. I imagine

my grandmother, a girl in that Great Hall's
polyglot, reverberating vault
more terrible than church, dazed by the stars

and stripes in the vast banner up in front
where the blessed ones had passed through. Then she did too,
to a room like a little chapel, where her mother

might take Communion. A man in a blue cap
and a blue uniform—a doctor? a policeman?
(Papa would have known, but he had sailed

all alone before them and was waiting
now in New York; yet wasn't this New York?)—
a man in a blue cap reached for her mother.

Without a word (didn't he speak Italian?)
he stuck one finger into her mother's eye,
then turned its lid up with a buttonhook,

the long, curved thing for doing up your boots
when buttons were too many or too small.
You couldn't be American if you were blind

or going to be blind. That much she understood.
She'd go to school, she'd learn to read and write
and teach her parents. The eye man reached to touch

her own face next; she figured she was ready.
She felt big, like that woman in the sea
holding up not a buttonhook but a torch.

- Mary Jo Salter

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change


Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.


Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.


Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.


Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.


The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

The Impeded Stream

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work.

And that when we no longer know
which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled
is not employed.
The impeded stream
is the one that sings.

- Wendell Berry

William Rain is a nature photographer living in Boulder, Co.
This photo goes nicely with the poem and the poem goes nicely with William.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Impeded Stream...

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Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

- Edwin Arlington Robinson

Why Are the Lilacs Still Here When Everyone’s Gone?

A writing class of grandmothers, Jewish Community Center
Winter wind rattling windows
Julia, pen in hand, hungry to tell her story

Auschwitz-Birkenau: one teenager in a long line of Jews
Julia’s mother and little sister kicked to one side
She the other
It was Himmler you know, she says
Numbly watching her mother and sister vanish
The sound of marching boots

Julia huddled, nameless days by the barracks door
What are you doing there?
Asked a compatriot
Waiting for my mother and sister
The woman pointed to smoke trailing into the sky
What do you think that is?

A fellow villager forced raw potato into her mouth
Staunching the reverse flow of her life
Day after day women toiling in stink and mud
Shovels and claws, endlessly moving stones
—the strength of labor matched only by the paucity of potato—
Days, weeks, a month out on the sodden field
Julia a sack of bones and stones

One day a square of sunlight appeared in the mud
Against endless clanging of metal against stone
As long as I keep looking at that patch of light, thought Julia
I will survive

And she did

All we need:
One patch of sunlight

- Margo Perin

For C.

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.

- Richard Wilbur

Going Back to Bed

Up early, trying to muffle
the sounds of small tasks,
grinding, pouring, riffling
through yesterday's attacks

or market slump, then changing
my mind—what matter the rush
to the waiting room or the ring
of some later dubious excuse?—

having decided to return to bed
and finding you curled in the sheet,
a dream fluttering your eyelids,
still unfallen, still asleep,

I thought of the old pilgrim
when, among the fixed stars
in paradise, he sees Adam
suddenly, the first man, there

in a flame that hides his body,
and when it moves to speak,
what is inside seems not free,
not happy, but huge and weak,

like an animal in a sack.
Who had captured him?
What did he want to say?
I lay down beside you again,

not knowing if I'd stay,
not knowing where I’d been.

- J.D. McClatchey

When Someone Deeply Listens


When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you've had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.

When someone deeply listens to you,
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind's eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered!

When someone deeply listens to you,
your bare feet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.

- John Fox

It Is Up To Us

I can feel violence coming toward me
The Tsunami that Ruth Ozeki said
Brought Japan closer to us,
And maybe North Korea and Niger.
Can you hear the continuing wars:
The hurricanes of guns, in Syria and
At Concerts, Night Clubs, schools, movies,
Political rallies and even churches?
The old bombs still breaking over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the memories
Of Manzanar and Heart Mountain, the
Trail of Tears, the avalanche at Orlando,
Of bloodshed that keeps coming?

I can feel the aftermath of that cruel approach,
Can’t you? A firestorm of torches,
And hooded men disguised with crosses,
in white ritual robes, and unrhymed chants.
It has already come for black youth in Hoodies,
And brown and white youth, and babies at school.
It has endangered species and oceans, is choking
Local streams, setting fires, sending floods,
Earthquakes, even Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and
Elijah can’t stop! All the Prophets with insomnia
Are wide awake now. And God, in her weakness,
Has not slept since before the Holocaust, and still
Turns over agitated, again, and strangled,
Again, in clouds of insidious invisible
And tasteless gas. A toxic cancer cocktail!
If you live that long! The Seraphim
are coughing and gagging, weeping
for all the Gods, seeing
from their watchtowers in the heavens:
It is surely and destructively coming.
Asthma, autism, anti-Semitism and Alzheimer’s,
Palestinian, Arab and English mouths, foam rabid
With death, towards us, and towards our children.
Unless we stop it. Unless we stop it
With compassion for every living thing.
And even for the slowly accumulating rocks!
It will keep advancing. It will keep on coming.

- Judith Stone

When Horror Becomes Mundane


The mystery is not that evil exists (undeniable)
or that evil men will seek power (inevitable)
but that good people give it to them.

We trade our fears and niggling insecurities
for the magic ring of simple certainties
that we think will bring us power,

but when we are seduced into giving up
our moral clarity, we become the crucible
where our soul is not the precious metal

but the fuel
in service to dark alchemies
that make horror unremarkable.

- Paul Asbury Seaman

Freedom's Plow

When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.
First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.
The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.
A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!
With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.
Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.
Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.
A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently too for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.
With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.
America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land."
America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!
A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

- Langston Hughes

Father and Son


I needed you to be a god.
to rescue me
from yourself.
I needed you to be larger
than a glass of scotch.
to leap out from the depression.
to look me in the eye
and see me.


Instead you were not a god.
You loved me in a human way.
Stumbled and slurred your words of apology.
And my adolescence was cast adrift.


We grew apart.
You in deeper withdrawal.
Me in increasing bitterness.
‘Till all we had was
“How’s the weather?” and the next cute grandchild story.


Over time, my life arced back towards you
just as you body wore out.
Finally, it was your return to childhood
that brought me to adulthood.


You left too soon
or I arrived too late.


Sometimes the final goodbye
Contains every hello that did not happen.


- Jose Enciso

Louie Lies


Louie lives by lying. He must always lie
all day long, and thus he craves fellowship.
He lies about the sunrise: "It was golden,
a great ball of fire clearing the rooftops,
sending the mockingbirds into wild screeches
as they scurried deeper into the branches
of the Atlas cedar." Actually the day
began slowly as the winter overcast
burned off above the treetops. The phone rings.
It's Louie. He's found a huge diamond ring
buried in his sock drawer. He has no idea
how it got there. "When I turn it toward
the light it gives off blue and yellow rays
like nothing ever seen. Would you like it?"
He'll be over within the hour. I make coffee,
turn on the classical music station
to hear Bach's Chaconne for the hundredth time.
When the bell rings it's Louie with a copy
of The Watchtower, his forehead beaded
with sweat, his eyes huge, his jeans sagging
under the weight of his new belly. Nothing
is said about the ring. Instead he tells me
about the women he met on his way over.
"One was from Prague, raven-haired,
pale as a ghost, six feet tall, right out of Poe.
The other spoke English, had been brought up
to believe she was Hemingway's daughter.
She chain-smoked Chesterfields. Both found God
in the Brooklyn Yellow Pages under
'Perishable Items.'" "Awake!" they'd cried
in chorus. Here he'd thought he was awake.
"Maybe I'll convert," he says, swirling his coffee.
He's tried Orthodox Judaism, Zen,
psychoanalysis, downhill racing,
organic farming, LSD. He shakes his head,
his wild black curls flashing in the noon light,
refuses more coffee, and rises to leave.
He has a lesson with his Latin teacher,
a young refugee from the Vatican
who wants to bear his child. The door closes
behind him, and the final notes of the Bach
scrape over and over. The record is stuck,
the DJ with the fake Irish accent is out
to lunch or drunk. I open The New York Times.


- Phillip Levine