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The Way It Is
There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
But you don't ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
Wow, this one is SO simple, SO succinct.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
It covers God, Intuition, Buddha-Nature, or whatever one might call it or not call it!
Just don't let go the thread!
:heart:
Stafford is one of my favorites, especially his "Travelling thru the dark".
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:
Blue Heron Walking
Not one of Mr. Balachine’s soloists had feet this articulate,
the long bones explicitly spread, then retracted, even more
finely detailed than Leonardo’s plans for his flying machines.
And all this for a stroll, a secondary function, not the great
dramatic spread and shadow of those pterodactyl wings.
This walking seems determined less by bird volition or
calculations of the small yellow eye than by an accident
of breeze, pushing the bird on a diagonal, the great feet executing
their tendus and lifts in the slowest of increments, hesitation
made exquisitely dimensional, as if the feet thought themselves
through each minute contribution to propulsion, these outsized
apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole,
these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail
their risen bird like useless bits of leather. Don’t show me
your soul, Balanchine used to say, I want to see your foot.
- Julie Bruck
Asking yourself, even the most mundane question, is like throwing the I Ching
The retreat is noisy
I walk downhill
towards the labyrinth and beseech the path
five times:
Tell me how an old man reaches
his authentic self?
Silently the path replies:
Your terrain is rocky.
One plods and plods,
sleeps and then plods some more.
Avoid fallen branches, but be sure
to gaze skyward through the leafless trees
way beyond the moon--
where trickster and saint
embrace in contentious paradox.
- Barry Denny
All the True Vows
All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.
There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.
Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.
Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.
Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen
nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.
By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.
Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,
it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.
Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you
and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,
that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.
I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.
Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years
in my own voice,
before it was too late
to turn my face again.
- David Whyte
To the New Year
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
- W.S. Merlin
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
I.
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood --
And gone are Phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
II.
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some Platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
IV.
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
V.
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
VI.
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
- William Butler Yeats
Twenty Hundred and Nineteen
Ah, Yeats, whom we had put away
with the old poems,
your lines carefully marked from
our study long ago
with the indomitable Ms. Elizabeth Drew
at the summer college
on the green Vermont hilltop,
so many lines part of our native tongue.
we scarcely remember it was you
who first told us “the center cannot hold.”
But now, “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen”
is put down before us
and we recognize once again
your prescient genius.
A century ago. To the year.
And now we read with new/old eyes
- Fran Claggett
Chicken Cosmology
Neither the chicken, nor the egg,
(since you asked). What came first was
the essential emptiness, the chickenless void.
Then a beak for pecking, followed by a tongue
for tasting, a gullet for swallowing, eyes for seeing,
legs and wings for fleeing all that is not-chicken,
and an anus to excrete it. Then came the chicken brain
for dividing the world into chicken-friend and chicken-foe.
Then the humans (at once both friend and foe)
came to feed the chickens and tend the coops and collect
the eggs, and wring an occasional chicken neck.
The humans thought that they came first, but the chickens
knew that the humans were after the eggs, which were
before the chickens (which hatched from them). But also
after the chickens (that laid them). Which for humans
is a conundrum. But not for chickens, who never ponder
which came first, because every chicken knows
that she came first, since everything in a chicken’s
universe is herself, not excluding the road, (which,
since you asked) the chicken crosses
to get to her better side.
- Richard Schiffman
Happy New Year
The party's done, the plastic cups used up -
the ones we never know whether to wash or throw away -
thus
ambivalence follows us
into the new year
starting with the cups.
But the feeling of being
together the best nourishment.
Although the food was also good.
My mother's traditional crab mousse
so fifties in flavor
Even the punch
a throwback to simpler days
when 3 kinds of sweet liquids mixed together
did not make us quake
with fear of the consequences.
There are of course big resolutions,
mostly the same
again and again
but the real joy comes
because I am just a bit calmer
a bit better at riding the waves
of my own tumultuous inner oceans
the steady inner core
like a steel rod liquid channel of awareness
quicksilver river of my dreams
is easier to hold onto
an alabaster bannister
in the storm of life.
My teacher brings out the poetry in me
like a doctor
extracts the built up fluids under the skin.
All these words accumulated from years
of picking at the scabs and neglecting
to clean old wounds.
Now they arise as the elixir of life,
the cream that rises to the top,
the honey sequestered in the flower
the scent of sprouted white narcissus on the driveway.
And I respond to welcome the new year with this poem.
- Basha/Barbara Hirschfeld
Basha/Barbara Hirschfeld
Fantasia: Firezone
In the bedroom
we awake
to smokedark
ceiling cracks
and walk
upside down
to the curtains.
In the kitchen
we eat
burned fennel,
smoked ham
and toast.
In the sink
we spy two singed
swans on a raft
of orange sponges
then watch them
fly through open
patio doors
toward a horizon
dulled by ash.
On the deck
we take a toy train
on miniature
bonerail tracks
past trolls incinerated
beneath Lego bridges.
In the driveway
we enter
a blistered bandshell
where a chorus
chants that to
the northeast
an inferno
is 10% contained.
In the garage
we test the
air purifier,
re-inflate
the zeppelin
and stock
firewalking
boots rated
at 500 degrees
Fahrenheit.
In the airship
we head west
to the Pacific
to join
a school of
of fire eels
and swim
toward Japan.
- David Beckman
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
- Donald Hall
Wall, that vile wall
"The wall, my wall, he says,
"We are invaded by the poor,
the forsaken, the persecuted,
the children. No matter the cost
we have to protect our border."
Set on his wall nothing is more important to him;
it rises & stretches in his imagination —
crosses deserts, divides plains & mountains,
separates parents from children, cuts
the primordial routes of the deer & the cougar,
ocelot & coyote, jaguar & wolf — his beautiful wall
that not even Joshua's trumpets could bring down.
"My wall, my wall!" he throws a tantrum
& to get it paralyses the government,
sinks the economy, sulks like the foolish brat
he is, obstinate on his wall cost what it may
in money, in blood, in death, in suffering.
The wall, that vile wall.
El muro, mi muro — dice
— nos invaden los pobres.
los desamparados, los perseguidos,
los niños. No importa el costo;
tenemos que proteger nuestra frontera.
Terco en su muro nada le es más importante;
se alza y se alarga en su imaginación —
cruza desiertos, divide llanos y cerros,
separa padres de hijos. Corta
las rutas primordiales del venado y la puma,
ocelote y coyote, lobo y jaguar — su bello muro
que ni las trompetas de Josué puedan derribar.
¡Mi muro, mi muro! hace berrinche
y para conseguirlo paraliza al gobierno,
hunde la economía, se atufa como el mocoso necio
que es, aferrado a su muro cueste lo que cueste
en dinero, en sangre, en muerte, en sufrir.
El muro, ese asqueroso muro.
- Rafael Jesús González
Bravo! Well doneQuote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Bravo!!
Well done.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
On The Cost of Written Language
Once upon a time
we knew the dancers inside water,
could name each one
by her seven names.
We knew the alphabet
of red sea stars, deer tracks
in the mud and the curl of Scorpio
in the August night.
By what magic
did such spirit turn to silence?
what convinced us
to trade ears for eyes,
fluid thoughts
for scratches of ink,
summer voices
for black forests bounded
by rectangular horizons?
What insect has eaten the green leaves,
while the newspaper
spreads its daily silence,
pages falling softy like snow,
with a muffled hiss?
Fascinated we gaze
endlessly into this mirror we’ve made,
reflections struggling for breath
beneath the surface, hiding like coral
inside the calcified skeletons
of our ancestors?
- Arthur Dawson
Those who Call themselves Elder
I dreamt of the gray-haired amongst us
who carry aloft on long dominant arms
huge beams of salient energy – cambers of their lives
congruent and cherished curves
resting on old-world joists
Their arms shone as light refracted
against a hovel of clouds
like aroused hues captured
after a long flight
as the craft descends
piercing amber and unstable air
dancing with lift while holding dew and place
Such light shivers alive
unaccustomed to being disturbed
let alone witnessed in beauty
or in reverence
I dreamt these gray-haired ones
spoke far less often
preoccupied perhaps with
readying themselves
for unfamiliar rituals
Their soft eyes gaze pass the horizon
landing on new light
blurred to the vision
of dragons
or dragonflies
Awake now to their prestige of instinct
awake now to the great unknown
- P. Gregory Guss
Ripening
The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done,
as much as by what we intend.
Our hair turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!
- Wendell Berry
Sonoma County Winter
Onward through this wonderfully dreary day
Gray clouds, low and wind-driven
speak of things I cannot name.
Rain drips through bare limbs
into the greening earth, and
I am amazed to be cold, wet, and
so vibrantly alive.
Let December know
its cold reach has fallen short.
Inside, inside . . . spring!
- Karl Frederick
How It Seems To Me
In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Dear California, I Write to You from Grand Island, New York
It is the light in the sky
that reminds me of you,
the summer blue flowing by.
But the clouds here remind me
more of Paris, the calmness of them
as though inside a painting.
The goldfinches on the feeders
no longer flee from me, the cardinals
tell me where I live. California,
am I in denial? Will I miss you
when the white snow falls and falls
on the quiet island world?
If I returned to you, would I miss
the train whistle across the river,
the 10 p.m. fireworks from the Falls,
the Niagara that is San Francisco Bay
green one day, Monterey blue the next,
a rush of ice in early spring that I follow
until it crashes, gorgeously, into the gorge
to bump along its sonorous path
until it melts back to its source?
- Katherine Hastings
The Penitent
I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, “Little Sorrow, weep," said I,
“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I’ve been!”
Alas for pious planning—
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My Little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep—
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!
So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, “One thing there’s no getting by—
I’ve been a wicked girl," said I;
“But if I can’t be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Without Winter
Without winter
how would we know spring?
How would we know the delight
of the first bud of the rose,
or the sighting of a robin
at the break of day?
How would we know
that we climbed out of the drudge
that winter holds?
That we have been transformed
from our underworld dive?
Without winter in our soul
how would we feel renewed by love,
by the awakening of sleepy cells
that long ago remained unchanged?
How would we know if we
passed through hell
to come out healed?
How would we know
what healing is?
Without the depths of our journey
How would we know we arrived?
Without winter
how would we remember
that not a spring comes by
without its promise of renewal,
its soft colors,
enchanting breeze,
its welcoming silence, setting the stage
for that first sign of relief?
- Sherrie Lovler
Hello, dear Larry -
I just wished to express a special "thank you" for all the great poetry you source & send out to us. I love the way poetry offers us different lenses to view life through – it's become essential to me in that way.
I'm saddened today in hearing Mary Oliver has died. Another bright light has left us...but we will always have her illuminating work.
Would you happen to have a favorite poem of hers you might share in this forum?
Again, thanks for all the interesting & thought-provoking work you offer us. It really helps sustain humanity's beautiful side in our sometimes bleak day-to-day existence.
From my heart –
dre
here is one good one. there are many.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?
Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.
But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?
Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education.
When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,
as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?
- Mary Oliver
(September 10, 1935 - January 17, 2019
“The heart’s spiritual awakening is the true work of our lives.”
—Mary Oliver on Emerson
What I Have Learned So Far
Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of -- indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.
- Mary Oliver
Dear Ms. Oliver
I plan to squander the rest
of my wild and precious life
among the idle
who appreciate simple things:
hot showers
sudden smiles
real strawberry ice cream
deluge and drought
broken bay laurel leaves
cool sheets
dark nights.
And before I leave, please
give me another noisy river
a bent tree
a sparrow’s flash
and an overflight of clouds
before the moon.
Give me a few clear images
to save for a rainy day
or the last long night’s dream.
- Karl Frederick
“What do you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
The Summer Day – Mary Oliver
The Call of the Open
Which yet joined not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
- Ranier Maria Rilke
Of Love and Other Disasters
The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he’d had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t
anyone he’d ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who’d moved back south
to live with her high-school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don’t need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she’d been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn’t get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. “The life line,”
he said, “which one is that?” “None,”
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then—embarrassed—looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
Spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. “There,”
she said, lowering his glasses, “I
got it,” and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it’s too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.
- Philip Levine
The Listening Fields
In the end is the Word
a weaving of all the world’s tongues
folds soft as night wind, hard as jail cells
silent as sun sipping sea mist, loud as fighter jets
Ever becoming, ever ending
and the end that is Now, that is our doing and our undoing
is a biblical flood of torn multitudes
crowding de-spirited shores
wave upon wave, wounded, mourning,
fleeing what began
when Word left the breath
for the ledger, the royalized lie
Even as Now implodes, our stories ripen
in an over-bright unfolding
of Word’s fall from grace,
endgames defiling Holy writ
end flames of creed and greed
ripping primal energies asunder
engulfing the armed and the innocent
Spirit fruit seeded in song,
watered in courage beyond the lash on naked flesh
the chains of disdain, the rabid, feral tortures
the battlefields, the borders, the gunner pathologies
the creeping, seeping poisons
Spirit fruit
pressed into wine on the page
Libations for the holy ones
for children lean and staring through refugee fences
or plump and mirthless, staring at flickering screens
Libations for all the lined faces, the colonized eyes,
selves betraying self and other
even as Other flows on
quickening grass, rippling feathers and fur,
curving horns and thorns, pulsing into petals,
into skin and pollen and papery wings
the One and the All breathing each to each
As it was in the Beginning
when we entered as echoes
melodies of the Milky Way
star chords becoming the listening fields
finding Word in the listening fields
- Cynthia Poten
Nothing Alive at Yesterday’s Altar
Why kneel
in the ashes of yesterday’s altar
when each day rises unfathomable
as a new mystery
and I must look
with fresh eyes or see nothing
but the shadows
of what has been . . .
chasing Grace or Peace
Equanimity or Insight
that no longer burns
with Presence.
May I find the courage
each day
to make a fresh altar
of my life
- Kay Crista
Elegy in Joy
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
- Muriel Rukeyser
To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust
Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin
Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,
for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know
there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.
But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine
though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.
You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be
the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.
- Wendell Berry
Cheeky AI
That artificial intelligence
got me down to a T-shirt.
Chasing me from shopping site to
Newsy site to some perceived insight.
Now they got me pegged for
Sporti Active Cheeky Boyshort Swim Bottom.
Oh Lordy, next a silk silver swanky
Swath of side string silhouetted
Slit suit with a hussy hanky-panky
Upright Invite.
- Ernie Carpenter
Words From Kafka
Lady’s eyes opened to her shamed belief
she’d let me down she who very much the lady
she who for the first time shat the carpet
she who appeared to us to be pleading for release
she who we were pretty certain knew she was dying
she with no conceivable notion of what it all meant
she was love trust companion sad it was over
no notion of her life’s meaning and certainly no Kafka
All those shells those crustacean bodies swept up
on the shores of Bodega Bay they had gone along
with the flow without knowledge of any reason
they were done and fulfilled with their endings
And of beginnings does any wooly caterpillar
reflect: know for a mere instant of its impending
transition of metamorphosis? No Kafka here either
Nor can any Blake or Rilke angel fully fathom a reason
Having spent the greater portion of my reasoning age
dwelling upon the meaning of life and the fear of death
I discovered my self to be pleasantly serene as I lay dying
as my lungs filled with emboli and as my brain began to bleed
and again when that same brain went into electrical seizure
and even that sense of actually entering the realm of death
no white light no angel no fear of a heaven or a hell
merely the sense that all would be well that I might die
Or that if I lived I would follow advice and continue to age
gracefully though being anything but perfect I would stray
from the serenity known during those dying moments
The trick lies deep within the words of the aforementioned
Franz Kafka: The meaning of life is that it ends
those of Kurt Vonnegut: …and so it goes
also Jesus Christ: It is consummated
Amen
- Ed Coletti
A Dialogue Of Self And Soul
{My Soul} I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
{My Self}. The consecrates blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
>From some court-lady's dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn
{My Soul.} Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
{My self.} Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery --
Heart's purple -- and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
{My Soul.} Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known --
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
{My Self.} A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? --
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
- William Butler Yeats
A Man in His Life
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to live and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
- Yehuda Amichai
Borders of Tomorrow
It happens when grim and serious
men answer all questions with a flag
and dismiss talk of civil rights with
scribble of a pen.
It happens if the knees of democracy
buckle and dark money decides
who walks the long road home and
who gets a chauffeured ride.
It happens when the doors of freedom
slam shut on desperate, broken hands
and we lock away children who come
from foreign, hungry lands.
It happens when we ignore the signs
that tell us, not how or when, but enough
for us to know, we lose the country when
we, the people, lose control.
It happens when we let it happen.
- Patrice Warrender
Stay strong and keep the faith.
Change is coming and has already begun.
The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
The Leash
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
- Ada Limón
Apprenticed to Justice
The weight of ashes
from burned-out camps.
Lodges smoulder in fire,
animal hides wither
their mythic images shrinking
pulling in on themselves,
all incinerated
fragments
of breath bone and basket
rest heavy
sink deep
like wintering frogs.
And no dustbowl wind
can lift
this history
of loss.
Now fertilized by generations—
ashes upon ashes,
this old earth erupts.
Medicine voices rise like mists
white buffalo memories
teeth marks on birch bark
forgotten forms
tremble into wholeness.
And the grey weathered stumps,
trees and treaties
cut down
trampled for wealth.
Flat Potlatch plateaus
of ghost forests
raked by bears
soften rot inward
until tiny arrows of green
sprout
rise erect
rootfed
from each crumbling center.
Some will never laugh
as easily.
Will hide knives
silver as fish in their boots,
hoard names
as if they could be stolen
as easily as land,
will paper their walls
with maps and broken promises,
scar their flesh
with this badge
heavy as ashes.
And this is a poem
for those
apprenticed
from birth.
In the womb
of your mother nation
heartbeats
sound like drums
drums like thunder
thunder like twelve thousand
walking
then ten thousand
then eight
walking away
from stolen homes
from burned out camps
from relatives fallen
as they walked
then crawled
then fell.
This is the woodpecker sound
of an old retreat.
It becomes an echo.
an accounting
to be reconciled.
This is the sound
of trees falling in the woods
when they are heard,
of red nations falling
when they are remembered.
This is the sound
we hear
when fist meets flesh
when bullets pop against chests
when memories rattle hollow in stomachs.
And we turn this sound
over and over again
until it becomes
fertile ground
from which we will build
new nations
upon the ashes of our ancestors.
Until it becomes
the rattle of a new revolution
these fingers
drumming on keys.
- Kimberly Blaeser
Choices
for Drago Štambuk
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
- Tess Gallagher
Scintilla, Star
In the old place, there was no place
that did not see me.
Wherever I went mothers whispered
about me like a Greek chorus:
I heard that boy ... I heard that.
I was just a boy. But it was
true, what they said, that I liked
other boys, that I had stolen Sarah’s,
though he was four years older
and they were very much in love.
I made him break up with her
in a Chili’s parking lot
while I waited inside. I was
fourteen. How embarrassing
to have been fourteen, to have eaten
at that Chili’s, often. That summer
I had no taste for anything
but him. Faintly of chlorine.
When he left for college
I had no one. Sarah’s friends
stared me down at school.
I found it was better,
if I could not be no one,
to be someone. Small, but
particular. Specified, which was
an apprenticeship for special.
Cold, another word for cool.
- Jameson Fitzpatrick
The Gift
Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.
It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come - maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.
It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."
- William Stafford
One of our American greatest poets, in clarity and unassuming humility to the world, but also feels like a transcendentalist. I was introduced to him thru the poem "traveling through the dark" by Kathleen Fraser in the in 1971. If you want to learn to write well, there is a good place to start by reading him.
To Step off a Hundred Foot Pole
The koan asks: If you can step forward and reveal yourself fully, there will be no place where you are called dishonorable. So, right now, tell me. How do you step forward from the top of the hundred-foot pole?
Start your day with
Three assumptions: you are
Safe. You have enough.
You cannot get life wrong.
Now, step out and live.
Foolish, I know. Knowing that
Danger, like dragons
Waits for so many,
Knowing hunger is inheritance to
Too many. Missteps must be
Avoided lest vulnerability
Be exposed. Still too many
With plenty
Start days with
Three assumptions: danger
Is all around. More is needed.
You will likely
Get life wrong, make mistakes
Expose vulnerability.
It is to those, I say,
Start your day with
Three assumptions: strangers
Are ones you haven’t yet met.
You have enough to share.
Life itself can’t be wrong.
It’s to those I say,
Safe, you’ll find
Those unlike you more
Like you. Satisfied
With enough, the grip
Of greed loosens, generosity
Becomes routine, normal.
Mistakes will reveal themselves
As unlocked doors.
Safe, satisfied, secure
We are able to step off
That hundred foot pole,
Feel the wind wave
Through our one body.
So to you I say, Start your day
Knowing you are safe,
You have enough,
You cannot get life wrong.
Now take that step.
The universe is here to hold you.
- Rebecca del Rio
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.
You moan, "She left me." "He left me."
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.
- Jelalludin Rumi
I can hear Coleman Barks in my minds voice. ( was that the translator?) On my list of 100 to read i have the masnavi, will i live that long...
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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Cleaning Up After the Poetry Salon
It's not always easy.
Proper nouns are manageable.
They stack well.
Biggest on the bottom -
The Great Plains, Idaho, Mt. Rainier -
then the smaller stuff left behind -
Boxcars, photographs, you know.
Adjectives are remarkably tough to clean up.
The dry ones catch on the furniture,
bury themselves in cracks
hide in the pocket of an old sweater.
They crumble to awkward, ungainly,
unmanageable, yes fragile
pieces …that somehow cunningly avoid
the shedding broom some poet has
left behind.
And wet ones like sticky and slimy - yikes!
Cleaning up the leavings of Wendell Berry?
it's a grange meeting hall.
Rich black dirt everywhere,
corn stalks, the lingering thick odor of
compost and just a hint of cow manure
on your shoes and your best carpet.
And Jesus! Those poems about stars -
the poets have no idea.
Whole constellations left behind -
Watch it with the Pleides, they have sharp points
And yes, the Dog Star does bite.
My rule would be -
you brought 'em, you take 'em home.
Food is good in a poem.
Mom's apple pie and romantic dinners for two
are usually digested by the salon - no leftovers.
It's the ethnic dishes with strange names
luedafisk, sauerkraut, gefiltafish
and anything made with hot peppers
Well, you know.
Poets - a little consideration -
slip in some sponges, maybe
a mop or really - just a mouthful of food,
a spoonful -
yes, spoons for everybody.
And come on,
no animals bigger than a cat or small dog.
polar bears and coyotes are disasters.
Oh I could go on…
mixed metaphors sliding
down the walls and tangled
in the drapes.
Cliches hiding their heads in the corners.
shy, embarrassed marmots standing by dead seals.
stinking sea weed and sharks behind the sofa
And fish - fish beyond number -
flopping on the floor.
Verbs are easy - they move around
so much - just
open the door and they
take care of themselves.
But poets,
It's the birds left behind…
Egret, Robin, wrens, a flock of seagulls,
a murder of crows…
For God's sake leave a window open.
But eagle, oh my friends, the eagle
he glowers there
from the chandelier
Royally pissed!
A moment in a poem
then forgotten
in the closed room.
I know, I know.
I'm making a new mess now -
I'll need some help here with
Idaho and that eagle.
For the rest
I brought 'em.
I'll take 'em home.
- Doug von Koss
How It Happens
The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us
- W.S. Merwin
There are a few that make something out of nothing and even without punctuation
one of the newer experiments poets are imitating from ws merwin
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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Background image taken one evening from the Jr. College's Maginni Hall's 3rd floor.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
If They Should Come for Us
these are my people & I find
them on the street & shadow
through any wild all wild
my people my people a dance of strangers in my blood
the old woman’s sari dissolving to wind
bindi a new moon on her forehead
I claim her my kin & sew the star of her to my breast
the toddler dangling from stroller hair a fountain of dandelion seed
at the bakery I claim them too
the sikh uncle at the airport
who apologizes for the pat
down the muslim man who abandons
his car at the traffic light drops
to his knees at the call of the azan
& the muslim man who sips
good whiskey at the start of maghrib
the lone khala at the park
pairing her kurta with crocs
my people my people I can’t be lost
when I see you my compass
is brown & gold & blood
my compass a muslim teenager
snapback & high-tops gracing the subway platform
mashallah I claim them all
my country is made
in my people’s image
if they come for you they
come for me too in the dead
of winter a flock of
aunties step out on the sand
their dupattas turn to ocean
a colony of uncles grind their palms
& a thousand jasmines bell the air
my people I follow you like constellations
we hear the glass smashing the street
& the nights opening their dark
our names this country’s wood
for the fire my people my people
the long years we’ve survived the long
years yet to come I see you map
my sky the light your lantern long
ahead & I follow I follow
- Fatimah Asghar
The Mortician in San Francisco
This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
was made monument—no, myth—by the years
since he was shot.
I remember when Harvey was shot:
twenty, and I knew I was queer.
Those were the years,
Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands
on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk—
elected on the same day as Dan White.
I often wonder about Supervisor White,
who fatally shot
Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk,
who was one of us, a Castro queer.
May 21, 1979: a jury hands
down the sentence, seven years—
in truth, five years—
for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White,
for the blood on his hands;
when he confessed that he had shot
the mayor and the queer,
a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?
Why cry over spilled milk,
some wondered, semi-privately, for years—
it meant “one less queer.”
The jurors turned to White.
If just the mayor had been shot,
Dan might have had trouble on his hands—
but the twelve who held his life in their hands
maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk;
maybe, the second murder offered him a shot
at serving only a few years.
In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White.
And he was made presentable by a queer.
- Randall Mann
Love Letter from Baghdad
Call me Rabia. I was
named for the Sufi Saint.
Blood pumps through the four
chambers of my heart,
swift and scarlet with joy or slow
and bruised black with sorrow.
We are the same.
This morning, as I pin up wash
in my rubbled court yard,
the long fingers of the sun reach
over the desert and sting my sleepless
eyes like dust, like diesel fumes.
There’s an explosion.
Did you hear it?
My neighbor sinks to the ground
in the folds of her burka,
a dark flower, rocking and keening,
her bloodied grandchild in her arms.
The earth trembles with
the terrible sound of her grief.
We are the same.
I want to share sweet memories
with you, of date palm and pomegranate,
the hay fragrance of saffron, the song
of the nightingale. I invite you
to share yours with me.
We are the same.
Come sister, let’s raise our arms
and begin. We’ll spin
and dance like the Sufis.
It will take as many turns
as there are stars
to make this right.
We do not yet know the steps.
- Gail Barker
A Brief History of Love
The first-born of Mother Chaos, it is said,
was Eros of the piercing, life-giving darts.
& then through eons & eons of Cosmic turmoil
was born Earth who in union with the Sun
through eons & eons of gestation
gave birth to Life. Through more eons & eons
of calamity, catastrophe & trial,
Life grew sentient —colors & sounds,
smells, tastes, the feel of things.
And later after eons & eons
(though far less) it grew conscious
of wonder & of myth, of history & science,
strange mixtures of love & fear,
curiosity, invention, & awry desires,
until Tonantzin, the Great Mother
is wounded by us, her wayward children.
Awaking to what is
now we must defend the Earth
from ourselves
with a fierce love.
- Rafael Jesús González
Breve historia del amor
El primogénito de Madre Caos, se dice,
fue Eros de las saetas penetrantes, dadoras de vida.
Y luego a través de eones y eones de agitación Cósmica
nació la Tierra que en unión con el Sol
a través de eones y eones de preñez
dio luz a la Vida. A través más eones y eones
de calamidad, catástrofe y prueba,
la Vida se hizo sensible —colores y sonidos,
olores, sabores, tacto de las cosas,
Y más tarde después de eones y eones
(aunque muchos menos) se hizo consciente
de asombro y de mito, de historia y ciencia,
extrañas mixturas de amor y de miedo,
curiosidad, invención y torcidos deseos
hasta que ahora Tonantzin, la Gran Madre
es herida por nosotros, sus hijos desviados.
Despertando a lo que es
ahora tendremos que defender a la Tierra
de nosotros mismos
con un amor feroz.
- Rafael Jesús González
Parkland
Consider the red-boned manzanita
for years its seeds patient
buried beneath parent shade
until acres of trees blazed
bright on sway-backed hills
then fell like dark snow—
a blanket of blackened ash.
But that heat released the sleeping seeds
cracked open tight seed coats, awoke
a generation to germination
now stretching down sturdy roots
now pushing up strong shoots
green arms breaking through
burnt and crusted soil—
now a bright reminder
of what youth can do
- Lisa Shulman
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child
and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
- William Blake
The Tale of Noah
Imagine Noah at the end of the Ice Age.
The glaciers are melting, seas rising.
Atlantis has gone underwater.
Civilizations are drowning, or learning to swim.
Everything is changing, new maps drawn.
His sons report warmer weather
All over the known world.
An ocean of water sits high above the valley.
Its icy lip thinning as danger looms.
He wants to save his animals from the flood.
So, he builds a boat that will only float.
His daughters report dying crops.
Men all around call him mad.
One day, the ice rim cracks, the frigid water
Sitting poised, ready to fill the void.
It is time. He leads his animals
Into the massive zoo, meticulously tailored.
His men report imminent disaster.
The ice rim cracks again.
At the foot of the valley is a stone wall, miles long,
Solid, firm, two hundred yards high.
It was made by men to keep strangers out.
But today, it will also keep the water in.
His animals report anxious dis-ease.
And the flooding begins.
The first torrent slams the heavy door shut.
The huge vessel spins like a top.
Men are thrown overboard into violent waves.
The border wall holds, the village is destroyed.
They all hear reports of snapping trees.
As the vessel lifts and floats.
For days they drift ever closer to the wall.
The new lake breaches, creating waterfalls.
Outside, all see the bobbing ship high above,
Expecting it to fall, come crashing down.
Soldiers report evacuations.
All hangs tense and beautiful.
Finally, a tunnel through the wall gives way.
The drain begins, a new river rushes out.
What was old washes away, destroyed.
But the huge wall stands firm, strong.
The shamans report sunny skies
As everything changes.
Weeks later, the water is only slightly down.
The boat is grounded on the valley’s arm.
All is intact, no one else has died.
Noah finally opens the door as silence abounds.
His wife reports that she is pregnant.
And the sky is a new strange blue.
- Jon Jackson
Borderland
As we zig zag the
US and Canada border
from Maine to Seattle
and into Alaska
We travel through Native lands
families and friends separated
long lines of cars and trucks
on land and bridges
close communities
divided
Passports to be shown
sunglasses off
those with a DUI
cannot cross over
even as passengers
or ever again
I heard it said
Sometimes it’s a long trek
other times not
Reservations and Reserves
two separate lands
on one border
or another
Veteran Elders come
to participate
at Eagle Staff gatherings
some well into their 90’s
Regalia and bundles
inside the car
the border patrol
depending who you get
know better now
to not go through them
Officers with good training
have learned to respect
the ways and traditions
different from theirs
Indigenous men
women and children
come to participate
in a pow wow
a celebration
a sacred circle
on the other side
First Nations go south
Native Americans go north
First Alaskans go east
Northern First Nations go west
To participate and celebrate
to give thanks for each other
the earth
the land and waters
animals and trees
stories from another time
Everything done in a circle
intricately sewn regalia
headdresses, jingle dresses
made with feathers, beads
and the hide of buffalo
caribou, deer, and seal
Songs and traditions
from long ago
to say we are one
in a circle
with no borders
- Ziibinkokwe, Turtle Clan (Patricia LeBon Herb)
Time to be the fine line of light
between the blind and the sill, nothing
really. There are so many things
that destroy. To think solely of them
is as foolish and expedient as not
thinking of them at all. All I want
is to be the river though I return
again and again to the clouds.
All I want is to stop beginning sentences
with All I want. No—no really all
I want is this morning: my daughter
and my son saying “Da!” back and forth
over breakfast, cracking each other up
while eating peanut butter toast
and raspberries, making a place for
the two of them I will, eventually,
no longer be allowed to enter. Time to be
the fine line. Time to practice being
the line. And then maybe the darkness.
- Carrie Fountain
Batter My Heart, Transgender’d God
Batter my heart, transgender’d god, for yours
is the only ear that hears: place fear in my heart
where faith has grown my senses dull & reassures
my blood that it will never spill. Show every part
to every stranger’s anger, surprise them with my drawers
full up of maps that lead to vacancies & chart
the distance from my pride, my core. Terror, do not depart
but nest in the hollows of my loins & keep me on all fours.
My knees, bring me to them; force my head to bow again.
Replay the murders of my kin until my mind’s made new;
let Adam’s bite obstruct my breath ’til I respire men
& press his rib against my throat until my lips turn blue.
You, O duo, O twin, whose likeness is kind: unwind my confidence
& noose it round your fist so I might know you in vivid impermanence.
- Meg Day
Untitled
The Soul
a seasoned wise man
sits on solid ground
without desire
free of fire
no hint of resistance.
While the personality
an insistent
teenager on espresso
bounces around
furiously from anger
to joy doubt
to hubris fear
to depression.
It yearns to be noticed
to be taken
seriously
to be loved
all the while
leaving a trail
of dirty laundry.
The Soul could care less.
When the personality
is ready the Soul will be
waiting like a peaceful
Buddha with an inviting smile.
Without words it will say
I’ve been expecting you.
Whether in the early morning
of life or the dead of night
the Soul will be there
receiving
accepting.
It owns no clocks.
- Clara Rosemarda
Caution: Can a half-ass Buddhist have nearly as many spiritual ancestors as a very wise roshi?
I
Unless you’re dead, my friend
you’re wounded, ten thousand times mangled,
blood seeping, pus oozing.
Then again, if you’re already dead, you’re a ghost.
Doesn’t even matter whether ghosts exist,
now or never.
My Zen teacher’s teacher died a few weeks ago. In the Zendo, on our alter beneath the photograph of Bernie Glassman,
Roshi’s spiritual ancestor, a thread of yellow tape
with the word caution printed across.
What’s there to be cautious about?
Perhaps a spiral descent,
releasing iron-clad fixed identity,
face time encounter with your own private stash
of greed, anger and ignorance, mask upon mask
peeled off your face, only the moment
and an organizing principle left
flapping like flesh
in the wind.
Do you equate death with absence of consciousness,
life null and void?
After leaving the Zen Center
where Roshi Enkyo suggested
I write a poem about depression; I head towards Think Coffee,
Ethiopian Blend and a croissant,
while workmen dig holes ten feet from the cafe door--
yellow construction tape warning customers:
CAUTION.
Why?
Danger ahead: unless you honor your ancestors,
they’ll seek revenge and burn your ass crisp as toast.
Still., they are only part of a flame that never subsides
until you’re dead
II
This poem, like existence,
Is full of detours
and unanswered questions,
a patchwork quilt multi-colored
stitched with random impressions.
111
Our spiritual ancestors need not be Gods or holy men.
Often they’re objects or character traits,
gifts that seem like curses,
handed down by neurotic parents.
(in my case Anne and Nat)
leaving me blindsided
by cynicism, materialism, fear.
Mom thought I would die if I severed a thumb,
explored the world on my own or aroused another’s ire.
While I wished nothing more
than growing up free of failure.
Dad sensed
I never would be tough as nails,
nor a flashy dresser like him,
always remaining
a dark weight
hanging from his heart.
I, on the other hand,
wished nothing more
than absence of anxiety.
At 77
embracing experience
and language,
images and aphorisms
freeing me to define my universe
while accepting the terrors of randomness,
I know my fears can never be less that of my spiritual ancestors,
than the greats and the ghosts: Henry Miller, Emily Dickinson, Willie Mays, Eugene V Debs, Basho and Richard Pryor.
In the fifth Grade Alfred Murphy
asked what part of my face I wanted punched
hard as hard ever was
and I began to cry.
Now,
(like the turn in a poem)
I box for pleasure
throwing hooks and uppercuts with abandon.
Maybe this poem
will continue
until the day I die
and only you,
my friend, will be left to judge
the fragments.
- Barry Denny
To My Ancestors
To you, whom I did not know,
To you, who took the steps
to create your future
to carve a new path as your world
turned upside down.
To you, who left your country,
your soil,
to brave the seas
and take a chance on life—
to start over
to have hope
to linger in thoughts and dreams and aspirations.
To you, who created the footsteps
to continue life
to want more
to nurture and bring forth a new generation.
To you, who let me be born
out of the desire of the human soul,
I thank you.
- Sherrie Lovler
Green, Green is My Sister’s House
Don’t you dare climb that tree
or even try, they said, or you will be
sent way to the hospital of the
very foolish, if not the other one.
And I suppose, considering my age,
it was fair advice.
But the tree is a sister to me, she
lives alone in a green cottage
high in the air and I know what
would happen, she’d clap her green hands,
she’d shake her green hair, she’d
welcome me. Truly.
I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be. It’s impossible not
to remember wild and not want to go back. So
if someday you can’t find me you might
look into that tree or—of course
it’s possible—under it.
- Mary Oliver
In Defense Of Those Who Harbor Terrible Ideas At Tax Time
:whip:It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Like so many others. Sleeping with that guy.
Not checking the address. Letting him put it in
without a condom just the once. Who hasn’t done
all that and worse, is what I was thinking,
driving to H&R Block to get my taxes done
and listening to the radio where everyone keeps talking about
the young black gay actor who orchestrated
a fake hate crime against himself.
It must have seemed like such a good idea to him
at the time, I think, clutching to my chest
the scattered bits of our financial life—
receipts and pay stubs, the record of all I’ve spent
on poetry contests and that workshop
on musical theater—enough
to buy a hot tub, a cheap used one, anyway,
on Craigslist—and that might
or might not be a disaster, too, you never know.
I’ve booked an appointment
with the nicest CPA in the world—Dennis—
who says to me, “You’re not a cookie-cutter person.
Don’t be ashamed of your life.” Really, he should be a therapist
instead of an accountant, but I hope he stays at this job forever,
smoothing out my crumpled 1099s, recording
the five hundred dollars I made coaching
for Poetry Out Loud, the thousand
from that one contest I did win, and then all the bills
when our old home’s ancient plumbing gave up the ghost.
It’s more than I can face head-on, this evidence
of how we live and earn and spend and waste
our lives, and I heard that the young man, an actor, staged the crime
against himself because he felt he wasn’t being paid enough—
though I bet he was paid more than a poet—
well, who isn’t? And who, in the end, doesn’t feel
attention must be paid? Although few would go
to such lengths to get it. I’ve had my share
of Bad Ideas, God knows, and all of them seemed Good to me
at the time, and so have you, I bet, and so has everyone.
It’s the human condition, after all, to be assailed by a million thoughts
a day, most of them insane—I remember I once thought
of becoming a dominatrix, for example—that didn’t last long,
then I thought maybe I’d write a play
about a woman who becomes a dominatrix
in late middle age, to pay the bills—and well,
you see where all this is heading.
I have to forgive this young man his terrible
idea, I have to because, in my own way, I’ve been him.
And while we’re at it all those others
whose freakazoid fancies must have seemed brilliant
to them for a minute, the way all our eurekas do at three a.m.—
gleaming like fool’s gold … haven’t we all
chased them like magical butterflies
through the meadowlands of imagination,
only to end up empty-handed and chagrined,
and far from home?
- Allison Luterman
The Moment
Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
when, nothing
happens
no what-have-I-to-do-today-list
maybe half a moment
the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence,
the white cotton curtains hanging still.
- Marie Howe
How to Triumph Like a Girl
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
- Ada Limón
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
- W.H. Auden
Renunciation
There will always be voices that promise you greatness and glory:
They call out from the worldly marketplace;
They call out from the spiritual marketplace;
They call out from the fill-your-holes-marketplace;
They call out from the bigger-better-more marketplace.
Do not buy their false promises, or purchase their ephemeral wares;
What fulfills for a moment is not worth the price of your soul.
There are heights that will lift you, but not when you try to ascend them;
There are powers that will fill you, but not when you make them your own.
There are treasures, and there are imitations of treasures.
If you have lost your true gold, at least turn away from the glitter.
Want only what is true.
This will lead you to the well of your deepest sorrows.
Follow that passageway, all the way down;
Become the dark emptiness of your absent core.
Be still. Don't measure the waiting.
Be still. Let the waiting become a fire.
Be still. Let the fire show you its secret heart:
A strand of clear light running through you.
Gather yourself there, and the luminous universe opens.
In that vast expanse, fathomless, infinite ocean of light,
Lose yourself, and find yourself, and become what you already are.
- Jennifer Welwood
Of Eons and Epics
I.
We wake with arrowheads—
our hands clamped around dreams,
dreams of hummocky bodies
glacial names tattooed
on each blue-rivered forearm.
What does it mean to hunger
for shards,
a glossary to story us?
I tell it this way:
the sculpting,
the whittle-form of earth—
say kettle with a hard k.
Something is always taken,
something left behind;
it becomes you—literally.
You tombolo, you esker.
We are all debris—
our story a remnant
of what moved across us.
What bounteousness!
We are glacial terrain,
marked pathways—myth.
What does it mean for my fingers, eyes, tongue?
to brim with a telling,
the silk-voiced dream
of one body moving against another?
II.
Sometimes the story is simple:
the etched back of Turtle that holds us—
it asks only belief.
Earthdivers one and all—sleek
water bodies surfacing,
emerge to sing on holy ground.
But the way they tell it
we are land animals,
humanity a paradise of aloneness:
a solved mystery, a locked garden
a departure—
that story the walking away.
The way they tell it
the flood always recedes
from impossible watery origins.
But who fixes the science of meaning?
The truth is:
awake and asleep we betray our small selves
wander beyond borders—
is water bird a metaphor?
III.
I tell it this way:
The diving for survival
(mahng, amik, nigig
together with mink and Nanaboozho).
Their feathered and furred bodies.
Ours. Gathering tiny grains of copper—
sand and sky’s minstrel breath;
Noodin whirling from four directions,
until this:
small magic we call earth.
But feel the fire and flexing beneath us—
the rumble-voiced pulse of this planet,
the vibration of our tectonic bodies?
Remember, we too are still motion—
burning wet and storied,
mythic like Turtle Island.
Imagine with me metamorphic becoming,
each miraculous emergence:
tetrapod limbs
from gelatinous tadpole bodies,
oceans and islands
rising receding rising
in their dance with volcanic force.
Our lives, too, servant to the alchemy
to the carving gusts of wind and water,
time—and telling.
IV.
Sing me again the saga of sin
and separation,
of humans and hierarchies;
I’ll sing you
the ballad of glacial bodies
of many creatures made of water and belief—
the one about transformations
about eons and epics—
these sacred cycles and everyday survivals.
The truth is:
we amphibious, we minstrel-born
wear the spiraling path of legends
on each whorled fingertip.
Like the trace of time on the clay of earth—
the drumlin swarms, the conical hills;
we too rise new each day from sleep
to storied lives—to archetypes and anthems,
to the spectacular castings of destiny.
Recite with me each rhapsody history or rumor—
our ancient epic inked now
pigment on rock-face, carbon on parchment,
memory on skin.
- Kimberley Blaeser
Becoming the Listening Fields
In the end is the Word and the Word is story – our story, soft as the womb,
silent as sun rays sipping sea mist, loud as sonic booms and atom bombs.
Our story, sacred and profane, ever beginning, ever ending
and the ending that is Now, that is our doing and our undoing,
a post-biblical flood of torn multitudes seeking refuge on dispirited shores,
history's catastrophes, seeded when Word left the breath to grow cold on the page.
Yet even as Now explodes, smoke fumes consuming the air, our story grows:
Plums ripening in the over-bright aftermath of alphabets' fall from grace
Endgames defiling holy writ, end flames of creed and greed, energies blasted from
primal bonds, forged into pawns of godless purpose -- weapons, poison, junk.
Still our stories ripen. Spirit fruit. Courage beyond the lash on naked flesh, beyond
the ropes of scar, the chains of disdain, the rabid feral tortures, the drone infernos.
Stories pour from us now, wine pressed into the page, libations for the goddess
gods within, for the children lean and staring through refugee fences, hungry
or over-plump and mirthless, staring at flickering screens. Libations for all the lined
faces, the colonized eyes, jailed and enslaved in thoughts so perverse they blind Self
and devour Other, the ever-fertile over-flowing Other, weaving scented air with
whisper leaves, with rippling feathers and fur, flashing horns and thorns, pulsing in
in petals and pollen, in glimmer vein wings, the One and the All, breathing each to
each, as it was in The Beginning, vibrations intertwining, forming harmony's web.
We entered as echoes, melodies from the Milky Way, star chords ebbing and
flowing, finding words in the listening fields, becoming the listening fields.
- Cynthia Poten
Frost on Fire
A thing that melts can also burn: like a
Thicket of ice in the pond, the cold net
Of stars, even the hard white ax of the
Heart. A man can freeze without getting wet
Just as he can lose without being lost,
But winter finds everyone, even though
We spend our whole lives eluding it. Frost
Reminds us of what is to come — the snow,
The sky, the trees, the skin, the sleet, the sleep.
How often have I woken in fear, blind
In my unknowing? The woods are dark and deep,
Even in the day; still the mind will find
Its way into the light, into the bright
Thaw of this life, where we, both flake and flame,
Fire and fall through. Let sun daze, let night
Show day how to blaze, let death drop its name.
A thing that melts can also burn: like a
Thicket of ice in the pond, the cold net
Of stars, even the hard white ax of the
Heart. A man can freeze without getting wet
Just as he can lose without being lost,
But winter finds everyone, even though
We spend our whole lives eluding it. Frost
Reminds us of what is to come — the snow,
The sky, the trees, the skin, the sleet, the sleep.
How often have I woken in fear, blind
In my unknowing? The woods are dark and deep,
Even in the day; still the mind will find
Its way into the light, into the bright
Thaw of this life, where we, both flake and flame,
Fire and fall through. Let sun daze, let night
Show day how to blaze, let death drop its name.
- Dean Rader
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I've added a little of my art work, hopefully enhancing the poem. I'll be sending it to friends in wintery climes.
Repetition, Evolved
The salmon unzip their bodies at last:
stomach, liver, intestine spilling forth
into an ocean of egg possibilities.
Upstream, the river warns with trembling, leafy fingers
as the fish turn blind sight and scale
towards yet another phase of moon. But such is the way
of arousal: a path, attractive by its own resistance,
whether bushwhack, gradient, or peak-flows.
And so, journeying evolves.
Given that supernovas hold hematite and carbon
in their fires, absently, as if mid-dream,
and given that feeling is a long cord between mind and slip,
this current that breathes the salmon’s flaming fins
is of course mapped out to them by stars,
some of whose light takes so long to get here
it arrives fallen, extinguished. But the salmon know this,
a sister electric storm holds their minds
to rapt attention, neurons flaring the dark spaces
of backwaters recalled into being.
And so, a young girl returns to her village
where she, a wife, a mother of two,
died seven years before. Her fingers trace
the kitchen cups, her husband's cheeks,
the faucet that ran out of water every morning,
emitting the weak roar of the salmon people.
Mahaseer, she whispers, and means the clothes
that clung to her hip-deep, adult body of the past,
immersed in clear waters where she filled pitchers
of stainless steel, watched the massive fish
tumbling in from the sea like ready, pregnant clouds.
- Maya Khosla
On Having Two Hands
My right hand is in its early seventies,
maybe older. It is very smart.
My left hand has existed outside of time
all these years.
I feel my way through the world
with my responsible right hand,
but the left, trailing behind,
remembers where I've been.
The right hand holds the reins,
but the left, flamboyant,
celebrates the wild bucking.
When I touch you with my right hand,
I deliver to you all that hand has learned.
The left one, awkward and honest,
gives me away.
- Rita S. Losch
I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
- Theodore Roethke
Earth Changes
what response
can I give
to the universe
for all the mistakes
this mind
and body commit
when I watch
water skippers
on the surface
I am entranced
by all the circles
not just one
- Joyce Pointe
United
When sleepless, it’s helpful to meditate on mottoes of the states.
South Carolina, “While I breathe I hope.” Perhaps this could be
the new flag on the empty flagpole.
Or “I Direct” from Maine—why?
Because Maine gets the first sunrise? How bossy, Maine!
Kansas, “To the Stars through Difficulties”—
clackety wagon wheels, long, long land
and the droning press of heat—cool stars, relief.
In Arkansas, “The People Rule”—lucky you.
Idaho, “Let It Be Perpetual”—now this is strange.
Idaho, what is your “it”?
Who chose these lines?
How many contenders?
What would my motto be tonight, in tangled sheets?
Texas—“Friendship”—now boasts the Open Carry law.
Wisconsin, where my mother’s parents are buried,
chose “Forward.”
New Mexico, “It Grows As It Goes”—now this is scary.
Two dangling its. This does not represent that glorious place.
West Virginia, “Mountaineers Are Always Free”—really?
Washington, you’re wise.
What could be better than “By and By”?
Oklahoma must be tired—“Labor Conquers all Things.”
Oklahoma, get together with Nevada, who chose only
“Industry” as motto. I think of Nevada as a playground
or mostly empty. How wrong we are about one another.
For Alaska to pick “North to the Future”
seems odd. Where else are they going?
- Naomi Shihab Nye
If It Were Sound
What can compare with the magic
of sunlight on a tree,
edging the leaves
With liquid gold?
Comes a breeze,
they ripple
in a way that,
if it were sound,
would be like tinkling bells
singing the world awake.
- Nina Mermey Klippe
Mistral in the Bastille
Censers swing like pendulums, near madam’s barred window.
Cinnamon and vanilla waft through shutters, blown apart by a strong mistral.
A magpie scouts for items to primp his nest, during mating season.
The sweet incense lures him onto madam’s cluttered vanity:
A tortoise shell brush tangled with strands of chestnut curls,
a silver tube of lipstick, gems and ornate broaches,
surround a small bouquet of gilded petals.
“May our lives be like flowers in the sight of God.”
Her distant lover wrote on a forget-me-not note
ribboned around the waist of crystal vase.
The mistral whistles a solemn tune, through the crack beneath her door.
The magpie lands in a hollowed tree,
Ribbons a bed to entice and protect
his soon-to-come mate
from the mistral that threatens to keep her away.
Madam laces her boots,
ties back her untamable locks,
clings to the knap of creviced rocks,
climbing up the mountain’s unmarked trail.
High above the thatched-roofed village, dotted with flickering flames
wood fires are stoked, not for the sake of heat or something to eat,
but for the daily rhythm of ritual itself.
Fishermen paddle the length of lake, farmers shake the soils from tools
and the rheumy eyed elders sit upon three legged stools,
while mothers comb through rows of the natty headed kids,
who chew then spit the cud of canes,
into the white coal flames.
Beneath a rocky outcrop, comes the swish and swagger of crocodile.
Monkeys scurry and scream, spring and snarl,
to dodge the open jaws, hunting for it’s next meal.
Madam feels the pangs from a love torn asunder;
sharp as a reptile’s hunger
vacant as the eyes of a motherless child.
An overbearing wind grows stronger, day by day.
Yet the needy gnaw on her heart and suck every last morsel of care.
It keeps her in this bastille of beggars, hooked on handouts.
Boys, able as oxen, seduced by street candy and tossed coins.
Girls, graceful as gazelles, sedate as zoo animals.
Both have learned to cower from the wilds.
The mistral carries seeds and scraps onto the far shores of tomorrow,
where Fisherkings and Flamingos sort precious pinks from borrowed blues.
Everyday the strong and feeble help each other
carry the burden of their grinding stone,
by sharing the unexpected generosity of a smile.
Madam hears a message more friendly than fierce,
“Who will help?, Who will help?”, the magpie screeches.
She hears the question that pumps the muscle of care.
Brilliant bougainvialla, perky pansies and fragrant frangipani,
flourish in red clay soils, fields of dry grass and rotting canoes.
The rhythm of ritual, the lapping of lake,
the lightening that splits a ten ton boulder in two,
the 800 year old Baobab burnt beyond recognition in moments.
Over sahara sands and ocean waves the mistral howls,
“GO!, GO!, before time snaps its jagged jaw.”
The magpie croons for his mate,
“Love’s the root of desire.
Love’s the scent that remains,
long after blossoms have waned.”
Madam’s feels no division or distinction from the love of the one above,
who carries her away on a strong north-westerly wind.
Tonight, her lover will wear her frangipani perfume
and a vase of sunflowers will brighten their room.
A forget-me-not note is tied to their hearts;
“Love’s the promise and prayer
for a world that has known
too much hunger and despair.”
- Emily Marie Bording
How do you make peace with a bad ending?
How do you make peace with a bad ending?
When all you fought for is going south
And domination tramples
What was that old saw?
The rich get richer….
Who says he wasn’t a visionary?
When bad ideas are taken as guidance
The sacredness, the preciousness
Of lives lived
Is preferred less than
Killing those who don’t believe
Or are in my way
Or with whom I don’t agree
When the bewitching of minds
The creation of false desires
Is even more successful
Battered into alignment with bad tv
Stupid and petty desire making
Cultures that are not cultures--
Just masking the profit machine
The buffoon Mussolinis arising
Like pins on a Mercator projection
And the consequences are obvious
Planet as we don’t know it
Nuclear run by idiots
Put in power--as if there can be any trust
Or insulation from their wills.
It should have been obvious
A great victory at hand--
Domination and discrimination
Of all sorts
Creates only more misery and fractured
Dismembered lives and spirits
Or simply obliterates those in the way.
How can it only be obvious to some?
It seems so clear.
Aggression, hate, rebounds
Read Shantideva.
Study the Bodhicaryāvatāra,
Feel the cost of your own anger and aggression.
If you know it
you can know your own misery and aggressiveness
Work it out
Or let it go
Move on.
Treasure your own clarity and
Spread it by example.
Humbly
Recognizing
Truly how stupid
I can be—at times
However bad it is out there
I am still capable of independence
And examination
Of an ethical life
Of love and fun
Of nurturance and sharing.
This belongs to me!
Remember Mandela surviving
Robin Island
Emerging with compassion
Integrity
And guts.
Admire those who are admirable--
Accepting that we all have
Some clay in our feet.
Please pardon my wistfulness--
I still hope for the bad ending
To turn
To let me turn to mold
As happy manure
Feeding another generation
And wishing them well
My son, my friends.
All the great good ones
Trying to figure out how to live
Loving, thoughtful lives
Respecting others
And having fun while
Marching and misbehaving.
Breaking the rotten eggs
Militant for what is now
And will always be true.
We are connected
And we can do a lot with knowing that.
Happy Trails!
- Phil Wolfson
Tree of Life Grandparents
Our olive tree when I was growing up:
an icon in our Jewish neighborhood,
easily a hundred years old,
with rough-barked branches shading the entire yard.
Women in modest dress
stopped to harvest the olives,*
not so much to save money
as to remind them of home.
Under this tree of life
passed my Jewish grandparents
when each came to visit.
Ida was old country,
her parents from Poland,
her old smells and
old Yiddish expressions
foreign to my growing interest in
The Twist,
Mr. Tambourine Man,
a*nd protests against The War.
Edna and Irv had left their heritage behind,
hosting us on Christmas,
not Hanukkah,
and wearing hippie beads to
a “happening” in the park.
One morning I walked the family dog
past a neighbor’s lawn.
A cross had been burned
into the grass the night before.
It stared at me every day
until new seeds grew in the spaces.
Soon after, I sat under our olive tree
filling out a college application
that asked my religion.
“Should I mark ‘none’?”
I asked my mother.
“You have to put ‘Jewish’,”
she said.
“Put Jewish, or else
people will think you are
trying to hide it.”
- Matt Witt
For the Anniversary of My Death
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
- W. S. Merwin
September 30, 1927 - March 15, 2019
An Elegy To Dispel Gloom
(After the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone
and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, November 1978)
Let us not sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories
of the death of sanity.
Two humans made of flesh
are meshed in death
and no more need be said.
It is pure vanity
to think that all humanity
be bathed in red
because one young mad man
one so bad man
lost his head.
The force that through the red fuze
drove the bullet
does not drive everyone
through the City of Saint Francis
where there's a breathless hush
in the air today
a hush at City Hall
and a hush at the Hall of Justice
a hush in Saint Francis Wood
where no bird tries to sing
a hush on the Great Highway
and in the great harbor
upon the great ships
and on the Embarcadero
from the Mission Rock
to the Eagle Cafe
a hush on the great red bridge
a hush in the Outer Mission
and at Hunter's Point
a hush at a hot potato stand on Pier 39
and a hush at the People's Temple
tries its wings
a hush and a weeping
at the Convent of the Sacred Heart
on Upper Broadway
a hush upon the fleshpots
of Lower Broadway
a pall upon the punk rock
at Mabuhay Gardens
and upon the cafes and bookstores
of old North Beach
a hush upon the landscape
of the still wild West
where two sweet dudes are dead
and no more need be said.
Do not sit upon the ground and speak
of other senseless murderings
or worse disasters waiting
in the wings.
Do not sit upon the ground and talk
of the death of things beyond
these sad sad happenings.
Such men as these do rise above
our worst imaginings.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti will be 99 on March 24th :thumbsup::
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Ferlinghetti-speaks-out-at-99-his-voice-as-vital-12764802.php
:heart:
Ferlinghetti 1981:
I have shared this poem by Seamus Heaney before but, given all that is going on in the world right now, it seems that we can all use some of this good medicine. He wrote this in Northern Ireland in the 1970s during “The Troubles,” a civil war whose end few others could imagine at the time.
The Cure At Troy
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
- Seamus Heaney’s translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles
Ordinary Decency
Now he was old and used a cane most of the time; on public transportation young and old
would offer him a seat. At first, the pride of his physical strength from when he was a younger
man which had remained with him would not allow him to accept these kindly gestures. Gradually
he began to let it go; from time to time he took a seat unless there was a welcomed day when the
strength would return. This grew into an acceptance, a gratitude, and an admiration for the ordinary
people whose simple acts of kindness just sprung naturally.
- Marvin Blaustein
America, I Sing Back
for Phil Young, my father, Robert Hedge Coke, Whitman, and Hughes
America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.
Sing back the moment you cherished breath.
Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.
Oh, before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep,
held her cradleboard, wept her into day.
My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery,
held her severed cord beautifully beaded.
My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps,
nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong.
My song comforted her as she battled my reason
broke my long held footing sure, as any child might do.
Lo, as she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself,
as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall.
My blood veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries
circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine.
Oh, but here I am, here I am, here, I remain high on each and every peak,
carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing—
and sing again I will, as I have always done.
Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing
the stoic face, polite repose, polite, while dancing deep inside, polite
Mother of her world. Sister of myself.
When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle.
Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light,
day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision—
Then, she will make herself over. My song will make it so
When she grows far past her self-considered purpose,
I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh, I will—I do.
America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.
- Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Blessing
Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
- James Wright
this is another by James Wright
Lying in a Hamock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
--James Wright
I Am Waiting
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Downhill Side
In my dream
I am a mountain
With high priced homes
Newly constructed
On my breasts
And a strip mall pouring over
On my hips and thighs
And on my downhill side
Someone’s abandoned garden
Fruit trees whose best seasons
Are long past
Thorny vines gone wild
The dried skeletons
Of vegetables not nurtured
Or picked
Overgrown grasses
Nobody wants
Even so
After the rains
It will try again
Sprouts will come forward
Like young, idealistic volunteers
They will compete with the wild overgrowth
Staking out their plots
Choosing their weapons
Relentless optimism
Virtuous and mighty
- Erin Riley