Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

- Mary Oliver

Early Spring


Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming)

For the Orchard

I want to tell you about the apple orchard.
How in the spring, when I come up over the rise,
blossom clouds soften the sky with a whisper.
How on summer afternoons I swim carelessly
through green shade and shards of light.
How autumn fills me ripe with desire,
and I devour stolen fruit as I walk.
How the winter horizon is sharpened at night
with unadorned branches pinned to stars.

This April day I’ll tell you
how I drew the trees as they lay felled.
Trunks, connected or not by shred of bark,
lay on stumps ridged by saw tooth.
Limbs capsized into impossible tangles
laced with the season’s new growth.
Here and there, among the terrible beauty,
I witnessed, first and last, the blossoming.

- Christine Walker

Just last week
as I was driving past the orchards
all budding open in spring
I passed one on the south end of Pleasant Hill Rd
all chopped down and lying in ruins
and I cried.

Lilith

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

For the Orchard

I want to tell you about the apple orchard.
How in the spring, when I come up over the rise,
blossom clouds soften the sky with a whisper.
How on summer afternoons I swim carelessly
through green shade and shards of light.
How autumn fills me ripe with desire,
and I devour stolen fruit as I walk.
How the winter horizon is sharpened at night
with unadorned branches pinned to stars.

This April day I’ll tell you
how I drew the trees as they lay felled.
Trunks, connected or not by shred of bark,
lay on stumps ridged by saw tooth.
Limbs capsized into impossible tangles
laced with the season’s new growth.
Here and there, among the terrible beauty,
I witnessed, first and last, the blossoming.

- Christine Walker

---

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great

Paschal candle of the sun.
Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britains.

Her totem the randy bunny.
Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays
Are stained by syllables of thunder
And Woden's frenzy.

O my fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery—
May they pass over us, the old

Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers,
Embodiments. Egg-hunt,
Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted
Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter

Compass of martyrdom,
Ground-up apples and walnuts
In sweet wine to embody mortar
Of affliction, babies for bricks.

Legible traces of the species
That devises the angel of death
Sailing over our doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

- Robert Pinsky

Easter Morning In Wales

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
Neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like broken nets.

Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
If I am really seeing, or dreaming,
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

- David Whyte

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

- Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

- Juan Ramon Jimenez

Saint Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
Put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessing of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the
hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken
heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the
fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

- Galway Kinnell

Close To The Road

Close to the road we sit down one day.
Now our life amounts to time, and our sole concern
the attitudes of despair we adopt
while we wait. But She will not fail to arrive.

- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

Only 4 lines - this I can handle. A mere 35 words!

And what if I spent as much time contemplating "our sole concern..." as I did counting those words?

I counted them twice, you know. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn't be embarrassed by an inaccuracy.

And men - "us men" - always seem to be writing about "She."

I'm sure there is a reason for this. I'm sure this is highly significant...

- Rex

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Close To The Road

Close to the road we sit down one day.
Now our life amounts to time, and our sole concern
the attitudes of despair we adopt
while we wait. But She will not fail to arrive.

- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

---

Strut Zones

Face east -
Legs folded, lids closed, palms open.
Breathe in, breathe out,
Listen.
Hear a low vibration of bold feathers fanned in a wide half circle, Thrumming,
Followed by a sharp stop and an eerie bass note.
The tom struts slowly, majestically,
Preened and postured he holds open his serious display,
A precision bouquet of thousands of feathers.
Seductive.
Each hollow shaft quivers, placed exactly,
In specific design, in specific order.
This brilliant sweep of florescence,
Flutters for his Jenny’s.
Revealing-- like cards of a winning hand splayed for examination.
Tempting-- like an unfolded fan exposing the look of “come hither”.
Then scarlet and cobalt infusions surround his face,
His featherless head,
Highlighting dewlap or wattle,
Colorizing caruncles.
An odd proboscis begins to swell
Then wiggles and dangles,
Retracts and elongates.
All in celebration of promiscuity.
He yelps, then clucks, then cackles.
She putts, then hoots, then hisses.
Each morning their yodels of gobbles echo from the tree tops,
Where they sit,
Feathers tucked, eyes closed, necks thrust out and up.
Prayers of thanksgiving are offered to what must surely be
An irreverent,
A most excessive,
And clearly magnificent god.
I sit, face east,
Legs folded, lids closed, palms open.
I practice gobbling.

- Colleen Werner

Clouds
*
All afternoon, Sir,
your ambassadors have been turning
into lakes and rivers.
At first they were just clouds, like any other.
Then they broke open.* This is, I suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves
*
the purpose.* I go on, soaked through, my hair
slicked back;
like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.
*
- Mary Oliver

The Apple Orchard

Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(translatied by Albert Ernest Flemming)

The Orchard

Three massacres have I witnessed and what can I say? Our older
one-legged cousins lie mutilated and silent, sprawled on dusty face.

Yet I hear them.
I hear them.
I hear them
uprooted, weeping, bleeding.
For one hundred years they faithfully delivered their quenching fruit.
Commit genocide on the unsuspecting? Not the bulldozer driver repeatedly backing into crunching trees - his kids need clothing and feeding. Neither the compadres hammering stakes and setting irrigation for the new cash crop - they have rent to pay, and obligations back home. Nor the owners, who believe a coastal touch of fog, perfect for these grapes, will soon play upon our lips.

- Raphael Block

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then as I had before that life
is no passing memory of what has been,
nor the remaining pages in a book waiting
to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold
It is the heart after years of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert, fallen to his knees
before the lit bush.
It is the man, throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished, opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

- David Whyte

This will be my last poetry post until May 14. I apologize for the interruption of the stream. Blessings to you all.
Larry


The Source

There in the fringe of trees between
the upper field and the edge of the one
below it that runs above the valley
one time I heard in the early
days of summer the clear ringing
six notes that I knew were the opening
of the Fingal's Cave Overture
I heard them again and again that year
and the next summer and the year
afterward those six descending
notes the same for all the changing
in my own life since the last time
I had heard them fall past me from
the bright air in the morning of a bird
and I believed that what I had heard
would always be there if I came again
to be overtaken by that season
in that place after the winter
and I would wonder again whether
Mendelssohn really had heard them somewhere
far to the north that many years ago
looking up from his youth to listen to
those six notes of an ancestor
spilling over from a presence neither
water nor human that led to the cave
in his mind the fluted cliffs and the wave
going out and the falling water
he thought those notes could be the music for
Mendelssohn is gone and Fingal is gone
all but his name for a cave and for one
piece of music and the black-capped warbler
as we called that bird that I remember
singing there those notes descending
from the age of the ice dripping
I have not heard again this year can it
be gone then will I not hear it
from now on will the overture begin
for a time and all those who listen
feel that falling in them but as always
without knowing what they recognize

- W.S. Merwin

I am not I

I am not I. I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

- Juan Ramón Jiménez

Any fool Can Get Into An Ocean

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What's true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor's seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you've tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That's when the fun starts
Unless you're a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You'll drown, dear. You'll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What's true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

- Jack Spicer

Prayer In April


-- For Millie and Orrin

And can there still be any doubt when just this morning,


right as we clamored off to school,


in the driveway, the bird--


that startled baby bird...


He was so frightened he'd lost his voice;


his little feather head became more yellow


with his quivering.


We three took turns holding him.


The complicity of our awe


is what strikes me now


and I hope I'll always remember it:


how we dropped to our knees,


how we took turns cradling him;


how, the moment that he flew


we lost our voices, too.

- Lisa Starr


Lisa Starr is Rhode Island’s poet laureate as well as an inn-keeper, mother, and basketball coach. As Poet Laureate, Starr is generating a statewide poetry pen-pal system between student and elderly writing circles, and has established poetry circles in hospitals, homeless shelters, the state prison, and agencies for children with severe mental and physical disabilities. Her other collections of poetry are Days of Dogs and Driftwood and This Place Here.

Beginning With Me

The war
that was raging inside me
has ceased.

Is this the path
that opens all
to peace?

One by One
we lay down the arms
we bear against ourselves

and embrace life.

- Kay Crista

Random Love

Standing alone
swaying with the day's residue
under the gaudy white chandelier
hoping to spy a friend for company
before the concert when a very
old man stooped over his cane
walks right up to me and asks,
‘are you the wild one?’

I pause with this gesture
of inquiry, join him like a dream
and reply, ‘yes, I am one of them,
there are many of us’
his eyes aglow and I declare
‘I am she.’

In a spontaneous moment of certainty
he looks directly into my eyes
and says, ‘I love you completely!’
He turns and paddles off to the cookie counter
as I murmur, ‘I love you too.’

I know he didn’t hear me
swallowed in a rapture all his own
I fumble in my coat pocket
for my ticket
the lights flicker for concert signal
and I shake my head
hold my heart
for this random love.

- Lizbeth Hamlin

Think of Others

As you prepare your breakfast – think of others.
Don’t forget to feed the pigeons.
As you conduct your wars – think of others.
Don’t forget those who want peace.
As you pay your water bill – think of others.
Think of those who only have clouds to drink from.
As you go home, your own home – think of others
– don’t forget those who live in tents.
As you sleep and count the planets, think of others
– there are people who have no place to sleep.
As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others
– those who have lost their right to speak.
And as you think of distant others
– think of yourself and say “I wish I were a candle in the darkness.”

- Mahmoud Darwish

Heat and Light

Terrible things have happened.
So many ruptures and losses...
and we, who cannot quite register,
let alone measure
impact and consequence,
bifurcating veins and roots
on this and that path,
put our hands to our heads
and open our mouths to scream
like the stand-in for Everyman
in Munch’s raw picture.

Even the Centenarian cherry tree is confused,
holding her mango saffron leaves
that in other years she readily released.
Fallen, brittle and brown,
they collected in little heaps
that rose and fell,
scuttering in a stiff winter wind.
This year’s leaves still flutter,
still veil her weathered limbs.

And I have seen the foolish tulips
poking through the hardening ground
and rash acacia beginning to bud in frost.
What can the rhubarb be thinking,
presenting enough stalks for a pie
in December?
The marigolds that bloomed
with fennel and lettuce
are still here.

In my mind's eye, marigolds signify
the suchness of things,
the way everything everywhere
is in season, in harmony
before the rhythms of day
and the rhythms of night
were confounded by artificial light.

Plundered, pillaged, sacked,
spirited away...
the eternal round,
the cycles and seasons.
Who patiently waits for May
for asparagus and strawberries?
Who sleeps at dusk
and wakes at dawn anymore?

There is a breach in the order of things
And all the cracks, fractures and gashes
have left absence in my heart
and a depression in my mind.

What awaits us at the close
of the Calendar?
What, when solar storms roar?
Better to slip through the bottle neck,
take a wooded road at the fork.
Untangle the knot, unwind the skein,
carry pistil and stamen and seed.

Tonight,
the season of falling leaves
gives way to winter-tide...
time to hibernate,
to dream.
In the shelter of sleep,
in the welter of repair
in the still time of remembering,
embers await rekindling.
Who will bring the wood
and who will light the fire?

- Carla Steinberg

Quiet

I love when it is quiet
enough to hear the vase with water
calling out for flowers.

Enough to hear my coffee, half-made,
calling for cream and sugar
while I head outside with clippers.

Enough to hear the vase, now with flowers
arranged, saying
you can see that this was done with
one hand making coffee.

The coffee saying
you can taste, can’t you, that
I was made
with one hand still on the clippers.

And still, for today, allowing
that while
not of one piece,

this is the coffee I will drink,
and the flowers which will
grace
our table.

- Scott O'Brien

This is also with gratitude, but I need to ask, as I've seen Larry post the poet's name before, is this the Sebastopol Scott O'Brien? Singer/songwriter Scott O'Brien? Scott, your works are wonderful. Thank you for these gifts. Thank you to Larry for giving us access to beautiful poetry on a daily basis.

Translating The Book of Serenity in Santa Fe

I dreamed I found a lost poem of Stanley Kunitz
on the cover of an old book
with a lot of white space and black text at angles.
In the dream I was married and I read the poem aloud over the table at the meal.
It was about a person who got an interview with God and spoke their question across
the swirl of hyperspace and night.

The person said, "What does it all mean, all the…and you… grief… and wanting impossible things?"—the question standing for other questions such as:
 the snow blossoms on the cotton wood trees
 and the thousands of snow geese falling out of the twilight in stages
 while the great sandhill cranes glide underneath,
 each to a precise place in the water shining
 with the last glow of sunset at Bosque del Apache,

but the translator is holding in memory many things such as
 the lost papyri of the Phoenicians
 and the place where the polar bears are leaving for

so in the language that crosses the turbulent dark,
only two words remain:
the question arrives as, “The dog?”

God is interested and tries, with the means at hand,
to show the whole pattern—
the response travels back through immensity and comes out, “Woof.”
“Woof,” says God, “Woof.”

and that will have to do.

My wife was not convinced by the poem,
but when I woke up it was still here
in my chest,
though most of the words could not cross over into waking.

- John Tarrant

I am off today for a week's retreat so this will be my last poem until May 30. Again, I must apologize for the interruption of service.
Larry

A Thousand Dogs

Go you your inner kennel
Where a thousand dogs
With soft eyes
Lick at the bars
And break your heart

Go ahead
Adopt the long eared generosity
You kept caged so long

Bring home the spontaneous joy
That some ancient loss
Abandoned by the side of a lonely road

Make a soft bed in your home
For the ragged bones
Of the weary hound
Of who you really are

There are no papers to fill out
And no shots required

Just a thousand dogs
To hitch to your sled
And pull you all the way home

- Warren Peace
(Translated from Canine by Brian Narelle)

I Think Continually of Those

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

- Stephen Spender

A Sunset of the City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

Gratitude

What did you notice?

The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;
the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

What did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;
the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;
the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the
pale green wand;
at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid
beauty of the flowers;
then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,
her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue, her
recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her
sturdy legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;
the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;
the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;
the tall, blank banks of sand;
the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;
the sea and its triangles;
the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green breast of the hummingbird;
the eye of the pond;
the wet face of the lily;
the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;
the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;
the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve
of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

- Mary Oliver

The Children and the Lighthouse Keeper

In memory of the victims of the Great Tsunami of 2004

Children noticed water pulling back,
past where parents let them wade. As if
the Spirit had filled his cheeks by sucking in,
exposing rocks on shore, boats their fathers
used to fish in early morning hours. They saw
for that moment they could walk to earth’s edge.

Just then, a lighthouse keeper at Point Calimere, edge
of India’s face to ocean, turned to look back
towards bare land he had recently observed and saw
a herd of Indian antelope galloping from the seafront, as
if
they knew they must escape. He remembered his father’s
words when he took this job: Learn from them all, in

time understanding he meant the beasts and birds in
this wildlife sanctuary on Nagapattinam’s edge.
He watched and wished he could ask his father
why five hundred black bucks were bounding back
to woodlands from the coast, climbing the hilltop. If
he told anyone about this strange event he saw,

they would laugh and surely say that what he saw
was the result of living alone so long. He recalled that in
the dead of night, working the late watch, he asked
himself if
he had made the right choice. Naming animals near the
edge
of extinction in his notebook, he prayed for everyone to
put back
nature as it used to be, learn from the animals, listen to
his father.

The children did not get the chance to hear their fathers
shout Run at Patanangala beach, before they saw
black water swallow them, felt their small backs
snap against trees, then sensed nothing. In
minutes, sixty people disappeared from the edge
of Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park. What if

just one had recognized why the flamingos flew, if
leopards had led or elephants picked up fathers
with families to ride their backs to higher ground, edging
out disaster. If only birds had relayed what they saw
beyond the ocean foam, translated water’s pulse in
language humans understood, we would have them back.

The lighthouse keeper, if he learned anything from the
animals, saw
how he must tell of graceful figures who ran farther than
ever before, in
search of that safe edge, never looking back.

- Janice Dabney

The Common Living Dirt

The small ears prick on the bushes,
furry buds, shoots tender and pale,
the swamp maples blow scarlet.
Color teases the corner of the eye,
delicate gold, chartreuse, crimson,
mauve speckled, just dashed on.

The soil stretches naked. All winter
hidden under the down comforter of snow,
delicious now, rich in the hand
as chocolate cake; the fragrant busy
soil the worm passes through her gut
and the beetle swims in like a lake.

As I kneel to put seeds in
careful as stitching, I am in love.
You are the bed we all sleep on.
You are the food we eat, the food
we ate, the food we will become.
We are walking trees rooted in you.

You can live thousands of years
undressing in the spring your black
body, your red body, your brown body
penetrated by the rain. Here
is the goddess unveiled,
the earth opening her strong thighs.

Yet, you grow exhausted with bearing
too much, too soon, too often, just
as a woman wears through like and old rug.
We have contempt for what we spring
from. Dirt we say, you're dirt
as if we were not all your children.

We have lost the simple gratitude.
We lack the knowledge we showed ten
thousand years past, that you live
a goddess but mortal, that what we take
must be returned; that the poison we drop
in you will stunt our children's growth.

Tending a plot of your flesh binds
me as nothing ever could, to the seasons,
to the will of the plants, clamorous
in their green tenderness. What
calls louder than the cry of a field
of corn ready, or trees of ripe peaches?

I worship on my knees, laying
the seeds in you that worship rooted
in need, in hunger, in kinship,
flesh of the planet with my own flesh,
a ritual of compost, a litany of manure.

My garden is a chapel, by a meadow
gone wild in grass and flower
in a cathedral. How you seethe
with little quick ones, a vole, field
mouse, shrew and mole in their thousands,
rabbit and woodchuck. In you rest
the jewels of the genes wrapped in seed.

Power warps because it involves joy
in domination; also because it means
forgetting how we too starve, break
like a corn stalk in the wind, how we
die like spinach of drought,
how what slays the vole slays us.

Because you can die of overwork, because
you can die of fire that melts
rock, because you can die of poison
the kills the beetle and the slug,
we must come again to worship you
on our knees, the common living dirt.

- Marge Piercy

God Wants to Know

she found God's questionnaire
in a Santa Fe souvenir shop
after she had visited
O'Keeffe's place at Abiquiu
and the Anasazi caves of Bandelier

such a spiritual landscape, she said
bones so bleached only God
could have remembered them

the questionnaire asks
how you first found out
about God--TV, word of mouth
or Divine inspiration--
and whether you

use other sources of inspiration--
sex, alcohol, fortune cookies,
insurance policies

the most puzzling one, however,
asks you to rate, 1 to 5, God's attempts
to balance disasters and miracles:

are flood, famine, and war, for example
justly compensated by recovery from disease
heroic rescues, and sports upsets?

she paused for a long time
before she looked for a trash can

- Jan Bowman

Step Into the Network

‘A dying woman plants a garden. Strange.’
‘It must be very strange.’
‘Yes, it goes on but you stop.’

Burned out, as in building,
Drained, as in swamped.
The authentic moment doesn’t
Have to be high energy.
Serotonin junkies
(Not that you..) live
After the wish to
Has dried up. When
You visit the well
To find it sucking
Sand, you may still be
Conscious. What then?
Smash glass?

Plod, plod. Hopkins
Should be living at
This hour. Six months
I hung up this project,
Why ? I was waiting
For one of us to die.
If tonight is bad,
In my exhaustion,
What were these last
Nights, years of them, to you?
Did Hope ever strip
Your dignity?

Young together, callow
I admire the studied
Face balanced on the tilted
Stem, cool swan
Hairdo of 1961,
To hide the greenhorn
Whose I.Q. knew her ignorance,
Older, you told us,
‘Good looks are sent
To use until we have
Something to say.’
Formidable. & today,
Silenced, most eloquent.

- David Bromige (1934-2009)




David Bromige’s bold and experimental poetry won him multiple literary honors and the respect of readers around the world. But the retired Sonoma State University professor and former Sonoma County Poet Laureate, who died June 3 at home in Sebastopol at the age of 75, will be remembered by those who knew and loved him for his rapier wit and generous support of other writers.

“I am happy to say that in the last week of his life his family was reading to him my new memoir and he was laughing at my jokes. He never missed a joke,” said former SSU colleague and novelist Jerry Rosen.

Bromige, he praised, “knew as much about contemporary poetry as any person in the world” and managed to communicate his love for poetry to his students during 25 years at SSU.

His wife of 28 years, Cecelia Belle, said he had a large filing cabinet filled with what he labeled “Uncalled For Manuscripts.” But he gave them all an insightful read and passed along encouragement with his comments.

His prodigious gift for writing mixed with his giving spirit won him many fans. Russian River poet Pat Nolan recalled watching him at a gathering of poets five years ago, seated in the shade of a porch in his signature Panama hat.

“One by one, everyone at that gathering stepped up to pay their respects to him...But the homage that was being paid to him that day was more of that befitting a godfather.”

Bromige had fought his way back from a heart attack and stroke in 2001, going on to serve as Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, writing, mentoring other writers and giving readings. But a lifetime struggle with the effects of diabetes finally caught up with him.

Only last month, he gave his last reading in a gathering by the Healdsburg Literary Society of 16 poet laureates from around the state. The ever dapper British-born writer stood to deliver his piece, the first time he had risen from his wheelchair in many months, said Belle.

The author of more than 40 books of prose and poetry, Bromige was working on a memoir, “Til There Was You,” at the time of his death. He also was eagerly collaborating with Reality Street press in England to publish a complete collection of his poetry.

He could often be seen seated in a chair in the front yard of his Sebastopol home soaking in the sun while pounding on a manual typewriter.

Born in London, he was a childhood survivor of The Blitz of World War II. He attended agricultural college and worked on a farm in Sweden before settling into a teaching program at the University of British Columbia. But it was his poetry and playwriting that won him prizes and a graduate scholarship to UC Berkeley.

He became involved in the emergence of historic poetic movements, and was taken up by the poets known as the San Francisco Renaissance, “who valued his erudition and his abilities with form and narrative,” said fellow poet and provocative poetry blogger Ron Silliman.

Always questioning conventional wisdom in poetry and the arts, Bromige was also adopted by young writers practicing what came to be known as language poetry, said Silliman. His 1980 volume “My Poetry” is considered “a classic of the genre,” he said.

Bromige counted among his distinguished mentors Robert Duncan of the Black Mountain School of Poets and Denise Levertov, for whom he was a teaching assistant at Berkeley.

During his years at Sonoma State he helped launch and maintain the university’s literary magazines while bringing a host of internationally known writers to campus.

His numerous honors include the Western States Book Award, the Pushcart Prize for poetry, the Canada Council award and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. In 1994 the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts named him a Sonoma County Living Treasure.

In addition to his wife he is survived by his son Christopher Bromige, of Vancouver, B.C., his daughter Margaret Belle Bromise, of Sebastopol, two grandchildren and numerous in-laws, nieces and nephews.

Bromige will be buried at Pleasant Hills Memorial Park in Sebastopol. A public celebration of his life is being planned for sometime in July.

The family suggests memorial contributions to the Sonoma County Book Fair, socobookfest.org/donate.shtml.

Sebastopol

It’s hard won fitness climbing
the ashen road that carries you up
the “Three Sisters” by bike.
Three ever steeper climbs, hot,
exposed, until the peak.
At the top, the air is cool dappled-shade.
Lying down beneath thick-knuckled trees.

Today, at the peak all is bare.
The trees split like boxed bodies in a magic trick.

Many fields have been cleared.
Apples for grapes. The new farmers say: Apples
are yesterday—as they till the earth for a new crop.
The old, who for generations have trimmed
the delicate limbs of the Gravenstein
are now red-faced and gnarled as their heirloom trees.

At the top, the ridge is a permeable line
between green hills that roll to the sea,
and the patchwork of farmed valley that leads to town.
What is good/bad is brackish as history:
A two-day stand-off between two men,
one inside the general store, the other
pacing the street. Nothing could come between.
Crowds gathered murmuring—it’s like the battle of Sebastopol—
and the name stuck. But, after the naming, what happened?
Someone must have stepped outside,
or someone must have stepped inside—
that much isn’t remembered.

I crest at the top—this time without stopping
look out at the ridge dividing sea from town,
push the pedal down, into the descent
into the rush and risk of air.

- Iris Dunkle

There Is No Going Back

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

- Wendell Berry

Poem for Thomas Berry

we were dreamed
in the cores
of the stars.
like the stars,
we were meant to unfold

we were dreamed in the depths
of the undulating ocean.
like the waves,
we were meant to unfold

like bursting supernovas, birthing elements,

which crucibles give rise to creativity?

the world makes us
its instrument.

Father Thomas,
speaking for stars, in a voice
old as wind: 'origin moments
are supremely important'

what are the origins
of a prophet?

found in syllables of Sanskrit,
or Chinese characters?
in a decade of midnight prayer?

in childhood epiphanies
rising like heat?
blue Carolina sky;
dark pines;
crickets;
birds;
sunlight
on the lilies,
in the meadow,
across the creek.

born in Carolina
on the eve of the Great War,
Saturn conjoining Pluto in the sky.
raised in a world of wires and wheels,
watching dirt roads turn to pavement.

brooding intensity,
measuring loss
when others could see only progress.

white hair communing with angels of Earth

Father Thomas, reminding us
we are constantly bathed in shimmering memories
of originating radiance

we are constantly bathed in shimmering memories
of originating radiance

the psychic stars:
the conscious soil:

this thin film of atmosphere;

and only gravity
holding the sea from the stars.

when a vision of the universe takes hold
in your mind, your soul becomes vast as the cosmos.

when the mind is silent,
everything is sacred.

like the spiral
like the lotus
like the waves
like the trees
like the stars,

we were meant to unfold.

- Drew Dellinger

Prisoners

Though the road turn at last
to death’s ordinary door,
and we knock there, ready
to enter and it opens
easily for us,
yet
all the long journey
we shall have gone in chains,
fed on knowledge-apples
acrid and riddled with grubs.

We taste other food that life,
like a charitable farm-girl,
holds out to us as we pass—
but our mouths are puckered,
a taint of ash on the tongue.

It’s not joy that we’ve lost—
wildfire, it flares
in dark or shine as it will.
What’s gone
is common happiness,
plain bread we could eat
with the old apple of knowledge.

That old one—it griped us sometimes,
but it was firm, tart,
sometimes delectable ...

The ashen apple of these days
grew from poisoned soil. We are prisoners
and must eat
our ration. All the long road
in chains, even if, after all,
we come to
death’s ordinary door, with time
smiling its ordinary
long-ago smile.

- Denise Levertov

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

- W.B. Yeats

In this moment…

Love called my name
this morning.
I almost missed it
because
I wasn’t paying attention.

So I stopped
whatever I was doing,
relaxed
and
became very still.

Even
my shadow
took a seat
and
waited.

Love called my name
this morning.
We laughed
in this moment.

And then,
love held me
with such a sweet fierceness,
a vast letting go
that
all I could do was bask
in the
preciousness
of being awake.

- Shahara Godfrey

THESE WORDS, THIS PEN

These words which you read
are not the first from this pen.
The pen has been primed for decades
in a reservoir of wonder.

This pen has been used as forceps, hammer, tweezer.
It has lifted words, delicate specimens, one by one,
picked them up in strips,
turned and explored them at every angle,
written words just to see how they’re shaped,
just to feel their curved vines easing into cursive,
just to whisper their sounds.

It has separated a word from its brothers and sisters on a page
to see how it behaves alone, associations and etymologies trailing like tails.
It has repeated a word across a page until the word has become meaningless,
totally strange.

This pen has dipped itself in the well of words,
has gone swimming in the sea of words.
It has dived with me
deep in some obscure, transmuting sea
where memory becomes image, image suggests itself as language,
language dies into silence,

where experience rests after its brief stint in the pop-up world
and is carried to where it can feed spirit
the way food is carried in the blood.

This pen is a hawk who has dived
from trees into wilderness lakes
under a full moon after prey.
This pen has grown fins
and swum where currents carried it.

This pen has been domesticated
in slow stages of trust,
man for pen and pen for man.
It has been dipped a few times
in a holy inkwell and written pure gold.

This pen sleeps at night, horizontal like me,
and like me it does not know
what it knows.

It despairs, feels numb,
then suddenly comes alive flashing
with the poise it learned as a hawk,
regurgitating what it has drunk
partly from the immediate, sensible world, partly
from a pure pool beside the seat
of the oracle at Delphi.

Then the lightning flash ends,
the cobra has finished striking,
the pen rests.

- Max Reif

To Be Of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

- Marge Piercy

Tao Says

To lead the people
you must follow behind them.
When the leaders wear the finest clothes
the fields are filled with weeds.
The man who is brave and calm
will always preserve life.
Those who conquer
do so only when they yield.
Good men do not argue.
They know that the tree
which does not bend
will finally be broken.

- Joseph Bruchac

After All

Whether or not there is a God
We cannot know and -
does it matter?
What does:
To live this life as if there was.

Whether life has meaning does not matter.
What does:
To give our life meaning
In how we choose to live.

Whether we have suffered failure
Does not matter.
What should:
To have sifted from the ashes
Any diamonds that we could.

To have loved and suffered the pain of parting
Does matter.
But what matters even more:
To be grateful for the time
We were given togther before.

Whether or not there is a heaven
Does not matter.
What does, when it's our time:
To have brought a smile
To sweeten the tears
Of those we will leave behind.

- Scott O'Brien

With Peacemaker’s Eyes

1.

We are watching
from within the longhouse
where our leaders were chosen
by the patient wisdom
of the gathered Clan Mothers,
raised up by the will
and the love of all the people
where the eagle's wings answered
the songs of peace for the children,
the elders, the coming generations.

We are watching
as the Eagle watched
from the top of the great Pine Tree
buried over the weapons
of fraternal war.

2.

We are watching
from within the kiva
where the calm water in the seeing bowl
trembled and the picture formed
of distant events no longer distant,
broken arrows, steel winds of death,
black and burning rain.

3.

We are watching
from within the lodge
where the male deer removed their horns
so that even by accident
no one might be injured.
There, where the fire was held
in the glowing eyes of Grandfather Rock,
we sweated to purify ourselves
for all our relations
as we prayed health and help
for all that lives

4.

We are watching
from the eagle catching pit
without food or water or sleep
as Bear and Deer stood before us to speak
as wind and cloud took shape to whisper
as we saw the far-off forms of greed
of hatred and hunger turn to spears of fire

5.

We are watching
from the shaking tent
from the ghost dance circle
from the dreamer's lodge
from beside the cross fire
where the water bird's wings
throbbed from the water drum.

6.

We are watching from Ndakinna,
from the Paha Sapa,
from beside the Sipapu,
from Cante Ista,
from the Big House,
from the 7th Direction
from the Heart of the World
from that humble place
within our own hearts
that only speaks
when we see ourselves
as Creation always sees us.

7.

We are watching
as the old Muskogee man watched
when the whirlwind approached,
the great cyclone column
swept over the plain
toward his small house
till he raised the hatchet
in both his hands
to strike it down into the willow stump,
splitting the storm
to pass on each side.

We are watching
as the grandmother watched
the small silver screen
in her unheated trailer,
shaking her head in ancient pity
as the men in black judicial robes
sewed stones into their garments
and waded chanting Hail to their Chief
into the dark water and its unknown depths

We are watching
as the white stone canoe
returns once more to the western shore
we are watching as the calm Peacemaker
and Ayontwatha and the Mother of Nations
observe the approach of the new Tadadahos.

The earth shakes beneath their behemoth feet.
Their bodies are contorted by power.

Snakes grow from their hair,
the snakes of greed
the snakes of hate,
the snakes of envy
the snakes of deceit.

They hiss and coil,
those snakes of oil,
those snakes of blood diamonds,
those snakes of death squads
those snakes of disease.

There is no magic,
no weapon of war,
no human law,
no gathered force
that can defeat these Tadadahos,
these Twisted Minds with all their power.

Yet the Peacemaker and Ayontwatha
and the Mother of Nations are unmoved before them.
They wait in the cool shade of the Tree of Peace.
Behind them stand all of the people
who remember what Great Turtle taught them,
hands joined together, they hear the drum
with its heartdeep rhythm begin to beat.
The Great Song of Peace will resound again.
Ayontwatha holds the bone comb in his hand.

- Joseph Bruchac

A Brave And Startling Truth
*

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
*
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn and scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
*
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
*
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
*
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
*
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
*
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
*
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
*
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
*
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
*
- Maya Angelou

Butterfly Behemoth

lying in the road,
your fine feather-like antennae
and massive wings
spanning East to West

furry brown body
upon stout brown legs,
undercarriage to a glory
of painted panels.

So, this is where
the Seminole and Algonquin,
in wood and bead,
found delicacy of line,
subtle color fusion;

the Navajo Nation
fantastically threaded,
dyed design;

the Pomo, Miwok,
painstakingly wrought
bighearted basketry.

the Acoma,
sacred, secret,
dazzling-patterned clay.

Let me lift you
on a leaf
for our coming journey.

Your rare magnificence
is fanning out, fanning out,
lightening a way.

- Raphael Block

The Meaning Of Birds

Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,
save the legend they are descended
from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards
that have somehow taken to air. Better the story
that they were crab-apple blossoms
or such, blown along by the wind; time after time
finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree,
floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves
until something in the snatch of color
began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter
anyway how they got up high
in the trees or over the rusty shoulders
of some mountain? There they are,
little figments, animated—soaring.
And if occasionally a tern washes up
greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal
or a mockingbird slams against the windshield
and your soul goes oh God and shivers
at the quick and unexpected end
to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others. We sense the downswing of time
and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant
concessions made in youth
are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath
of age. Perhaps temperance
was not enough, foresight or even wisdom
fallacious, not only in conception
but in the thin acts
themselves. So our lives are difficult,
and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds
of youth have, as the old men told us they would,
faded. But still, it is morning again, this day.
In the flowering trees
the birds take up their indifferent, elegant cries.
Look around. Perhaps it isn’t too late
to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn’t too late
to flap your arms and cry out, to give
one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.

- Charlie Smith

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

- Miguel De Unamuno

The True Love

There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours
especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never
believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held
out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man
who would walk every morning on the gray stones
to the shore of baying seals, who would press his
hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his
prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the waters.

And I think of the story of the storm and the people
waking and seeing the distant, yet familiar figure,
far across the water calling to them.
And how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking
and that calling and that moment when we have to say yes!
Except it will not come so grandly, so biblically,
but more subtly, and intimately in the face
of the one you know you have to love.
So that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them we find, everything holds us,
and everything confirms our courage.

And if you wanted to drown, you could,
But you don't, because finally, after all
this struggle and all these years,
you don't want to anymore.
You've simply had enough of drowning
and you want to live, and you want to love.
And you'll walk across any territory,
and any darkness, however fluid,
and however dangerous to take the one
hand and the one life, you know belongs in yours.

- David Whyte

Cast All Your Votes For Dancing

I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.

I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.

But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.

You can stay that way
And even bloom!

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and works and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure
But then drag you for days
Like a broken man
Behind a farting camel.

You are with the Friend now.
Learn what actions of yours delight Him,
What actions of yours bring freedom
And Love.

Whenever you say God's name, dear pilgrim,
My ears wish my head was missing
So they could finally kiss each other
And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!

O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter

And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!

- Hafiz

The Clod and the Pebble

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet;
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these meters meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

- William Blake

The Altar of This Moment

Place everything you can perceive -
Everything you can
See,
Hear,
Smell,
Taste,
Or touch,
Upon the altar of this moment
And give thanks.

It is over so soon -
This expression,
This single moment of your precious life,
This one heart
pounding itself open
with fear or wild joy,

This one breath rising
in the cold winter air
smoothly and gently
or coughing and sputtering,

Bow, while you can, before
This one taste
Of afternoon tea
Warming its way to your belly,
Or the fragrant orange
exploding its sweet juice
in your grateful mouth.

You have to love
The antics of your mind,
Imagining life should only be sweet.
The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.
It is whole, like you,
Before you think yourself to pieces.

Place this moment's pain and confusion on the altar, too,
And give special thanks for such grace
That wakes you up from sleeping through your life.
Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,
yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.

In this one moment,
Your eyes meet mine and there is
a single looking.
What is peering from behind our masks?
Can it touch itself across the room?

Place your palms together;
Touch your holy skin.
In another moment it will shed itself.
What will you be then?
What were you before you had two hands?
What are you now?

You cannot capture That
and place It on the altar of this moment.
It is the altar,
And this moment's infinite expressions,
And the Seeing,
And its own devotion to itself.

You are That.

- Dorothy Hunt

Coyotes

Is this world truly fallen? They say no.
For there's the new moon, there's the Milky Way,
There's the rattler with a wren's egg in its mouth,
And there's the panting rabbit they will eat.
They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope,
Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?

And yet we're crying over the stars again,
And over the uncertainty of death,
Which we suspect will divide us all forever.
I'm tired of those who broadcast their certainties,
Constantly on their cell phones to their redeemer.
Is this a fallen world? For them it is.
But there's that starlit burst of animal laughter.

The day has sent its fires scattering.
The night has risen from its burning bed.
Our tears are proof that love is meant for life
And for the living. And this chorus of praise,
Which the pet dogs of the neighborhood are answering
Nostalgically, invites our answer, too.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?

- Mark Jarman

What the Animals Teach Us

that love is dependent on memory,
that life is eternal and therefore criminal,
that thought is an invisible veil that covers our eyes,
that death is only another animal,
that beauty is formed by desperation,
that sex is solely a human problem,
that pets are wild in heaven,
that sounds and smells escape us,
that there are bones in the earth without any marker,
that language refers to too many things,
that music hints at what we heard before we sang,
that the circle is loaded,
that nothing we know by forgetting is sacred,
that humor charges the smallest things,
that the gods are animals without their masks,
that stones tell secrets to the wildest creatures,
that nature is an idea and not a place,
that our bodies have diminished in size and strength,
that our faces are terrible,
that our eyes are double when gazed upon,
that snakes do talk, as well as asses,
that we compose our only audience,
that we are geniuses when we wish to kill,
that we are naked despite our clothes,
that our minds are bodies in another world.

- Chard deNiord

Monkey Mind

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.
I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

- Steve Orlen

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

- W.S. Merwin

Another Spring

The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Northern Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

- Kenneth Rexroth

Mule Heart
*
On the days when the rest
have failed you,
let this much be yours --
flies, dust, an unnameable odor,
the two waiting baskets:
one for the lemons and passion,
the other for all you have lost.
Both empty,
it will come to your shoulder,
breathe slowly against your bare arm.
If you offer it hay, it will eat.
Offered nothing,
it will stand as long as you ask.
The little bells of the bridle will hang
beside you quietly,
in the heat and the tree's thin shade.
Do not let its sparse mane deceive you,
or the way the left ear swivels into dream.
This too is a gift of the gods,
calm and complete.
*
- Jane Hirschfield

One Day

One day I will
say
the gift I once had has been taken.

The place I have made for myself
belongs to another.
The words I have sung
are being sung by the ones
I would want.

Then I will be ready
for that voice
and the still silence in which it arrives.

And if my faith is good
then we'll meet again
on the road
and we'll be thirsty,
and stop
and laugh
and drink together again

from the deep well of things as they are.

- David Whyte

A Felicitous Life

His old age fell on years of abundant harvest.
There were no earthquakes, droughts or floods.
It seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy,
Stars waxed strong and the sun increased its might.
Even in remote provinces no war was waged.
Generations grew up friendly to fellow men.
The rational nature of man was not a subject of derision.

It was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed.
He was envious and ashamed of his doubt,
Content that his lacerated memory would vanish with him.

Two days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts.
Smoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years.
Lava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns.
And war began with a battle on the islands.

- Czeslaw Milosz

God Says Yes to Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

- Kaylin Haught

American Tune

Many's the time I've been mistaken and many times
confused.

Yes, and often felt forsaken and certainly misused.

But I'm all right, I'm all right, I'm just weary to my
bones.

Still, you donít expect to be bright and bon vivant so
far away from home, so far away from home.

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered I
don't have a friend who feels at ease.

I don't know a dream that's not been shattered or
driven to its knees.

But it's all right, it's all right, for we've lived so
well so long.

Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on, I
wonder what went wrong, I can't help but wonder what
went wrong.

And I dreamed I was dying.

I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly and looking
back down at me smiled reassuringly, and I dreamed I
was flying.

And high above my eyes could clearly see the Statue of
Liberty sailing away to sea, and I dreamed I was
flying.

And we come on the ship they call the Mayflower, we
come on the ship that sailed the moon.

We come in the age's most uncertain hour and sing an
American tune

oh, but it's all right, it's all right, itís all
right, you can't be forever blessed.

Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day and
I'm trying to get some rest, that's all I'm trying is
to get some rest.

-Paul Simon

THE MORAL INDIGNATION
of Mayor Cory Booker

Nothing like ears falling to the floor
nothing like a South American colonel pontificating
nothing like this
more like a dark and stormy night
more like West Side Story but in Newark, New Jersey
more like a parable of the returning son
the story retold of Sacco and Vanzetti

Four college students lined up against a steel-barbed fence shot execution-style

The mayor recounts this darkest night of his first year
how he curled up on his couch

How this is not the America he believes in
how his friends get sick of hearing him speak of his patriotism
and his dreams of what it means to be an American
how Newark is going to be a destination city, full of parks
he knows there is a God somewhere in charge
and he knows he talks too much when he gets tired
and this has been a most stressful and long week
blood spilt on one more sidewalk
please forgive him for talking too much
for looking as if he is in shell-shock
(his brown-orbed eyes belie an innocence)
for sometimes crying
not hearing—he has these flashes—
a mother’s anguish, brother’s rage
forgive him for all the mistakes he has made
he has tried to learn, lived in Brick Towers, made the police rounds,
brought in youth programs, cleaned up the precinct bathrooms
how he has just come back from yet another shooting
this time a 14-year old opening fire—on a playground—seven wounded

Nothing like ears falling to the floor
but this time a whole nation is listening

- Nancy Cavers Dougherty

America

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

- Robert Creeley

I Remember Galileo

I remember Galileo describing the mind
as a piece of paper blown around by the wind,
and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree,
or jumping into the backseat of a car,
and for years I watched paper leap through my cities;
but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing
Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck,
dancing back and forth like a thin leaf,
or a frightened string, for only two seconds living
on the white concrete before he got away,
his life shortened by all that terror, his head
jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust.

It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground,
his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing,
that showed me the difference between him and paper.
Paper will do in theory, when there is time
to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows;
but for this life I need a squirrel,
his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering,
the loud noise shaking him from head to tail.
O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel
finishing his wild dash across the highway,
rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

- Gerald Stern

Wooden Boats

I have a brother who builds wooden boats,
Who knows precisely how a board
Can bend or turn, steamed just exactly
Soft enough so he, with help of friends,
Can shape it to the hull.

The knowledge lies as much
Within his sure hands on the plane
As in his head;
It lies in love of wood and grain,
A rough hand resting on the satin
Of the finished deck.

Is there within us each
Such artistry forgotten
In the cruder tasks
The world requires of us,
The faster modern work
That we have
Turned our life to do?

Could we return to more of craft
Within our lives,
And feel the way the grain of wood runs true,
By letting our hands linger
On the product of our artistry?
Could we recall what we have known
But have forgotten,
The gifts within ourselves,
Each other too,
And thus transform a world
As he and friends do,
Shaping steaming oak boards
Upon the hulls of wooden boats?

- Judy Brown

Cottonwood Trees

The cottonwoods are
flinging themselves outward,
filling the air with spiraling flurries,
covering lawns in deepening drifts.
You could not call this generosity.
Like any being, they
let loose what they have
in order to survive,
in order that their lives might continue
in a new year's growth.
The more seeds they send out
on their lofted journeys
the greater the chance
for their kind to flourish.
There is no hesitation.
No one asks how much
they will give. Without words
they know so clearly
that everything depends
on what we call giving,
that which the world knows only as creation.

- Lynn Ungar

The River of Bees

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

- W. S. Merwin

Good People

From the kindness of my parents
I suppose it was that I held
that belief about suffering

imagining that if only
it could come to the attention
of any person with normal
feelings certainly anyone
literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend
pain when it went on before them
and would do something about it
whenever they saw it happen
in the time of pain the present
they would try to stop the bleeding
for example with their own hands

but it escapes their attention
or there may be reasons for it
the victims under the blankets
the meat counters the maimed children
the animals the animals
staring from the end of the world

- W.S. Merwin

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

- Jane Hirshfield

Waking

Get up from your bed,
go out from your house,
follow the path you know so well,
so well that you now see nothing
and hear nothing
unless something can cry loudly to you ,
and for you it seems
even then
no cry is louder than yours
and in your own darkness
cries have gone unheard
as long as you can remember.

These are hard paths we tread
but they are green
and lined with leaf mould
and we must love their contours
as we love the body branching
with its veins and tunnels of dark earth.

I know that sometimes
your body is hard like a stone
on a path that storms break over,
embedded deeply
into that something that you think is you,
and you will not move
while the voice all around
tears the air
and fills the sky with jagged light.

But sometimes unawares
those sounds seem to descend
as if kneeling down into you ‘and you listen strangely caught
as the terrible voice moving closer
halts,
and in the silence
now arriving
whispers

Get up, I depend
on you utterly.
Everything you need
you had
the moment before
you were born.

- David Whyte

Plums Failing Well

So what if plums fall
out of the tree, to lie
squashed and decomposing
on the earth? So what if
the only attention they receive
is from the ants and birds
who find something in them
to feed from still,
all spayed and color changed?
If they could breathe,
do you think they would say
more than so what?
This is good, to live
to the end as something
to get taken. What was
the ripeness for anyhow?
Why should chromosomes blink
and twitch inside the seed,
the pit at the middle, the vast
earth-shaped center of all
of this? So what if we lie
here or there as pith
in the cold night where the owl
hoots at the stirring that will
compute into the dark color
of that calling and the ground
we leak into,
small piece by small piece.

- Linda Gregg

At This Moment

And if I have nothing to say
and all the words inside my brain
are hollowed out, scraped clean, gone,
then let nothingness stream forth
in rows of blazing zeroes.

Let emptiness be the still lake it is
where I coast in my small boat
fishing for the thing I cannot find,
the lake where stones travel
searching lifetimes for the bottom.

Let silence come like animals
in the dark mountain night,
watchful yet unafraid, licking my body
with tenderness the way a mother bear
licks her cubs, less to clean them
than to give them strength.

Let the absent words dissolve
before they're formed
and the fret and strain of pulling
one sentence toward the next
slacken, until all that's left
is something wild and musical,
one note without speech.

- Ethna McKiernan

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The ride you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

- John O'Donohue

The Wheel Revolves

You were a girl of satin and gauze
Now you are my mountain and waterfall companion.
Long ago I read those lines of Po Chu I
Written in his middle age.
Young as I was they touched me.
I never thought in my own middle age
I would have a beautiful young dancer
To wander with me by falling crystal waters,
Among mountains of snow and granite,
Least of all that unlike Po’s girl
She would be my very daughter.

The earth turns towards the sun.
Summer comes to the mountains.
Blue grouse drum in the red fir woods
All the bright long days.
You put blue jay and flicker feathers
In your hair.
Two and two violet green swallows
Play over the lake.
The blue birds have come back
To nest on the little island.
The swallows sip water on the wing
And play at love and dodge and swoop
Just like the swallows that swirl
Under and over the Ponte Vecchio.
Light rain crosses the lake
Hissing faintly. After the rain
There are giant puffballs with tortoise shell backs
At the edge of the meadow.
Snows of a thousand winters
Melt in the sun of one summer.
Wild cyclamen bloom by the stream.
Trout veer in the transparent current.
In the evening marmots bark in the rocks.
The Scorpion curls over the glimmering ice field.
A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets.
Thunder growls far off.
Our campfire is a single light
Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls.
The manifold voices of falling water
Talk all night.
Wrapped in your down bag
Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids
Your breath comes and goes
In a tiny cloud in the frosty night.
Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise.
Ten thousand years revolve without change.
All this will never be again.

- Kenneth Rexroth

The Well Rising

The well rising without sound,
the spring on a hillside,
the plowshare brimming through deep ground
everywhere in the field—

The sharp swallows in their swerve
flaring and hesitating
hunting for the final curve
coming closer and closer—

The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat
counseling decision, decision:
thunderous examples. I place my feet
with care in such a world.

- William Stafford

Milk from Chickens

The day my son declared with hammerhead certainty
that milk comes from chickens was the day
I yanked him out of the city
and drove west to farm and prairie land.

Like a nail pried from hard wood, he complained
from the back seat, missing electronic games and TV.
Near the South Dakota border, he saluted
a McDonald’s as we flew by.

I wanted my boy to take a turn lifting
barb wire to slip into open fields
keeping an eye out for the crazy bull.
I wanted him to hold a bottle for a lamb,

to feel the fierceness of animal hunger,
the suck of an animal mouth.
I wanted him to sleep in darkness encoded
with urgent messages of fireflies,

to see the bright planets in alignment overhead,
to stand on the graves of his grandparents,
dead so many years before he was born,
and to trace the names etched on granite pillows,

hard as the last sleep.
How else to plant in him the long root of plains grass,
help him reach water in drought and
know who his mother is?

- Margaret Hasse

Compassion

Have compassion for everyone you meet
Even if they don't want it.

What seems conceit, bad manners,
Or cynicism is always a sign
Of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on
Down there where the spirit meets the bone.

- Miller Williams

In Praise of the Earth

Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth,
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And hold our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed's self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.

- John O'Donohue

Atavism

1.
Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes
you were like this once, there was air,
and quiet; it was by a lake, or
maybe a river you were alert
as an otter and were suddenly born
like the evening star into wide
still worlds like this one you have found
again, for a moment, in the open.


2.
Something is being told in the woods: aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found, eating, dying, being born.
A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind, away out over everything.

- William Stafford

Panning

Have you ever wondered
why,
just when it seems
that things are flying
out of your control,
you're headed to the edge,
the waters calm
and you come back to center?

Or
why,
just when your life
is feeling steady, balanced,
on an even course,
everything suddenly shifts,
slides and sloshes to the side?

Maybe god is panning for gold,
looking for the bright bits
among the dross.
Do you really want
to keep them hidden
any longer?

- Larry Robinson

Reception

They were sitting at their tables on the lawn
when suddenly I saw them all
in a line approaching a door that opened
on a field that was also a lawn.
I was in awe of the guests, the way
they sat in the shadow of the door
and sipped their drinks, the way
they laughed and cried. I watched
a Cessna fade into the sky
as something that was there for a while
in the form of pure idea, as something
that would burn one day like a straw,
but hummed for now in lieu of prayer
then disappeared into a cloud.
I saw the endless line of happy guests
move along, move along,
forgetting everything as they passed
beneath a high dark beam
into a field that was also a void.

- Chard DeNiord

Your Panning is a nice bit of the gold, thanks

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Panning

Have you ever wondered
why,
just when it seems
that things are flying
out of your control,
you're headed to the edge,
the waters calm
and you come back to center?

Or
why,
just when your life
is feeling steady, balanced,
on an even course,
everything suddenly shifts,
slides and sloshes to the side?

Maybe god is panning for gold,
looking for the bright bits
among the dross.
Do you really want
to keep them hidden
any longer?

- Larry Robinson

---

Green-Striped Melons

They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.

Some people
are like this as well—
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.

An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.

- Jane Hirshfield

Glad

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer
field her team, the Gladiators, is losing

ten to zip. She never loses interest in
the roughhouse one-on-one that comes

every half a minute. She sticks her leg
in danger and comes out the other side running.

Later a clump of opponents on the street is chant-
ing, WE WON, WE WON, WE . . . She stands up

on the convertible seat holding to the wind-
shield. WE LOST, WE LOST BIGTIME, TEN TO

NOTHING, WE LOST, WE LOST. Fist pumping
air. The other team quiet, abashed, chastened.

Good losers don't laugh last; they laugh
continuously, all the way home so glad.

- Coleman Barks

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

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

- Denise Levertov

One Spark

One spark can ignite a wild and raging fire
falling onto dried tinder, too long apart from wetness.

Spark turns to ember
ember to flame
flame to fire
fire to ignition, initiation,
immolation, or illumination.

Another spark with self-same potential
lands on hardened ground or moisture-laden soil
and simply glows out, as if never burned.

There is no fairness to this system.
It happens, or it doesn’t, depending
on a million factors of circumstance and environment,
history and fate.

Every spark contains the power
and potential to burn down the world
or illuminate a new one.


- Lion Goodman

An Oregon Message

When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon—no one.
Now our trees are safer than the stars,
and only other people's neglect
is our precious and abiding shell,
pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone.

From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.

This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere—
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.

Burn this.

- William Stafford

Halley's Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

- Stanley Kunitz

Talking Back to God
For P.V.J.

This time, you tricked us all—
Ashes to ashes, jade stones of sorrow.
We swallow until we sink
into the small rooms of our grief.

The script said you’d leave the hospital
(you’d beaten the odds so many times before).
That you, even small as a swallow,
would rise in a whir of wings.
That you would talk back to God—
Tell him he better call on somebody else.

Instead, you made a grand exit
drawing the curtains on our surprise
and stepped out of your frail body
a Russian doll—becoming
a phoenix blazing bright
with love and redemption.

Wherever you are, we ask one last request:
Open the curtains of our surprise—speak back to us—
breathe back the fire into our hearts
until the wooden walls of our grief
burn to cinders.

- Iris Dunkle

At Great Pond

the sun, rising,
scrapes his orange breast
on the thick pines,*
and down tumble
a few orange feathers into
the dark water.
On the far shore
a white bird is standing
like a white candle ---
or a man, in the distance,
in the clasp of some meditation ---*
while all around me the lilies
are breaking open again
from the black cave
of the night.
Later, I will consider
what I have seen ---
what it could signify ---
what words of adoration I might
make of it, and to do this
I will go indoors to my desk ---
I will sit in my chair ---
I will look back*
into the lost morning
in which I am moving, now,
like a swimmer,
so smoothly,*
so peacefully,
I am almost the lily ---
almost the bird vanishing over the water
on its sleeves of night.

- Mary Oliver

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

- Joseph Stroud

Old Man Leaves Party

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

- Mark Strand

Everything

I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,
what I mean, that don't go looking for the
laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves, I want to
keep close and use often words like
heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish
the question mark and her bold sister

the dash. I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass.I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be

songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the wold;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.

- Mary Oliver

Full Moon

Full moon,
pull this poem
like the tide
from my heart.

Full moon,
send your magic
from beyond
to heal
my ill mother.

Full moon,
hold this holiday
in your timeless keep,
there to revisit
always with joy.

Full moon,
follow my daughters,
keep them safe
as they journey
their night.

Full moon,
delight my love,
call your cousin,
thin silver arc,

Full moon,
bring on my age
with the soft glow
of the orchard
filling with silent
shadows of deer.

- Scott O'Brien

Communion

If I'm you, or you me—
Interpenetrating God—
enlarge our intimacy.

You who are animus
and blood—
who make me dust

from this table
blown into grass,
invisible—

Is it you—or I—
I pass
and cannot see?

- Fiona Sampson

Near The Wall Of A House

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

- Yehuda Amichai

The Laughter Of Women

The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness

It rattles the Chambers of Congress
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out

The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again

Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women

It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other

What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

- Lisel Mueller