Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Grecian Temples


Because I'm getting pretty gray at the temples,
which negatively impacts my earning potential
and does not necessarily attract vibrant young women
with their perfumed bosoms to dally with me
on the green hillside,
I go out and buy some Grecian Hair Formula.


And after the whole process, which involves
rubber gloves, a tiny chemistry set,
and perfect timing, I look great.
I look very fresh and virile, full of earning potential.
But when I take my fifteen-year-old beagle
out for his evening walk, the contrast is unfortunate.
Next to me he doesn't look all that great,
with his graying snout, his sort of faded,
worn-out-dog look. It makes me feel old,
walking around with a dog like that.


It's not something a potential employer,
much less a vibrant young woman with a perfumed bosom
would necessarily go for. So I go out
and get some more Grecian Hair Formula-
Light Brown, my beagle's original color.
And after all the rigmarole he looks terrific.
I mean, he's not going to win any friskiness contests,
not at fifteen. But there's a definite visual improvement.
The two of us walk virilely around the block.


The next day a striking young woman at the bookstore
happens to ask me about my parents,
who are, in fact, long dead, due to the effects of age.
They were very old, which causes death.
But having dead old parents does not go
with my virile, intensely fresh new look.


So I say to the woman, my parents are fine.
They love their active lifestyle in San Diego.
You know, windsurfing, jai alai, a still-vibrant sex life.
And while this does not necessarily cause her
to come dally with me on the green hillside, I can tell
it doesn't hurt my chances.


I can see her imagining dinner
with my sparkly, young-seeming mom and dad
at some beachside restaurant
where we would announce our engagement.


Your son has great earning potential,
she'd say to dad, who would take
a gander at her perfumed bosom
and give me a wink, like he used to do
back when he was alive, and vibrant.


- George Bilgere

Basket

You should go
from place to place
recovering the poems
that have been written for you,
to which you can affix your signature.
Don't discuss these matters
with anyone.
Retrieve. Retrieve.

When the basket is full
someone will appear
to whom you can present it.
She will spread her wide skirt
and sit down
on a black stone
and your basket will bounce
like a speck in sunlight
on the immense landscape
of her lap.

- Leonard Cohen

Signs of Impermanence


The fact that I'm getting old and not just older.
That wine in a glass tastes better than wine
in the stomach. That all matter is not only
streaming toward the edge of the universe
but that my tears are too, and not from the passing
of next of kin, or even from sad visions, but from
old movies seen too many times, and never more
upsetting than the last time, when the ghost,
for instance, had no face and only pointed.
The fact that you can never find good bacon,
you can never relax in the tub, you can never
have a dream that doesn't have at least one
ominous sign. That breath becomes heavier
than gold, time lighter than air, and striving
cumulonimbus. A house on a hill on a country
road with pale sky shimmering? Try to find one.


- Edward Nudelman

This Poem


This poem is dangerous; it should not be left
Within the reach of children, or even of adults
Who might swallow it whole, with possibly
Undesirable side effects. If you come across
An unattended, unidentified poem
In a public place, do not attempt to tackle it
Yourself. Send it (preferably in a sealed container)
To the nearest centre of learning, where it will be rendered
Harmless, by experts. Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning. Words
Can seriously affect your heart.


- Elma Mitchell

Blue Iris


Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?
Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk.
Well I think I can read books.


What’s that you are doing?
the green headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.
I close the book.


Well, I can write down words like these, softly.
“What’s that your’re doing?” whispers the wind, pausing,
in a heap just outside the window.


Give me a little time I say back to its staring face.
It doesn’t happen all of a sudden you know.


”Doesn’t it ?’ says the wind, and breaks open, releasing
distillation of blue iris,


And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.




- Mary Oliver

The Still Time


I know there is still time—
time for the hands
to open,
to be filled
by those failed harvests,
the imagined bread of the days of not having.
I remember those summer nights
when I was young and empty,
when I lay through the darkness
wanting, wanting,
knowing
I would have nothing of anything I wanted—
that total craving
that hollows the heart out irreversibly.
So it surprises me now to hear
the steps of my life following me—
so much of it gone
it returns, everything that drove me crazy
comes back, as if blessing the misery
of each step it took me into the world;
as though a prayer had ended
and the changed
air between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on common things that inexplicably shine.
And the old voices,
which once made broken-off, choked, parrot-incoherences,
speak again,
this time on the palatum cordis,
saying there is still time
for those who can groan
to sing,
for those who can sing to heal themselves.


- Galway Kinnell

Let someone Catch You


It’s in the
falling
that we rise
in that fall-on-your-face
SPLAT
that we forget
who we think we should be
and in that emptiness
find our fullness

Don’t get mad at yourself
and leave
for failing to find perfection
as soon as possible
millionaire by thirty
PhD by thirty
saint/martyr by thirty

Let someone catch you
so they can be the hero
if that’s what they need
let yourself fall
if you really want
to save the world


- Lin Marie deVincent

O Captain! My Captain!






O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.





O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.



My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.


- Walt Whitman

Round Woman

My mom was a round woman
About 5’ tall
Maybe 180-200#

My mom’s sisters, my aunties,
Were mostly round women,
Especially my aunt Margaret.

I loved my Aunt Margaret best.
Sometimes when my mom was at work
Or traveling for politics
My aunt Margaret would live with us
And care for us.

When I came home from school
There she’d be – eyes blazing –
Arms open – hugging me deeply & sweetly

I would be folded back into her bosom
And she would invite me to come to the table
For a snack and a game of canasta.

My aunt Margaret had her stomach stapled three times.

I grieve for my aunt Margaret.

I walk over to her grave and reach in and kiss those staples
And unravel them and fold myself back into
That round woman’s love.

I am a round woman.
Is there anyone in the house who would walk with me
To put the staple gun down?


- Patricia Flasch

For all the round women in my family and

African Chuckle(for Duncan)
That African chuckle
wafting around
smoky jazz joints,
and weaving
between ragtime tunes,
around
suburban kids
break dancing
in the high school quad;
around
pale men
high-fivin’ and jivin’
and huggin’ and bumpin’
and practicing a myriad
of soulful handshakes
simply to touch
each other—
that
sweet African laughter
wafting
in church choirs
singing
a balm in Gilead &
low swinging sweet
chariots
is
the laughter
of the
African ancestors
who
watched white men
colonize
their lives,
their land,
their people.
But
when they tried
to colonize
the African heart,
they
failed.
Instead,
the white
heart
was colonized
by the African
soul
whose words
& rhythms
& songs
& djembe dance to the gods
now beat
in the chest
of white,
black, brown and
even yellow men.


And now
I know why
the African gods laugh.


- Greg Kimura

I'm Working On The World


I'm working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.


Here's one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple "Hi there,"
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.


The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!


Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time's unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won't be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.


Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don't whine that it's steep:
you'll stay young if you're good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn't insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.


When it comes, you'll be dreaming
that you don't need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it's part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you'd feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.


Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach's fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.


- Wislawa Szymborska

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World




The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.


Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;


Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks


From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''


Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,


``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''


- Richard Wilbur

USA Politicians In Uniforms


How gorgeous you all look
In your new mandated outfits
Reflecting your true colors
Reflecting your true values
Reflecting your true donors
Reflecting who you owe favors


I love the new transparency
Full accountability is now your mantra
Your anti-government messages loud
Pro-corporate fondness now seen
Just as the NASCAR driver jumpsuit and car
Now patches, corporate logos


No more hiding, secret lunches, junkets
Are you liberated from your cage of choosing?
Democracy went where or was it ever here?
Legitimate plutocracy schoolchildren now learn
Has been our way 236 years

Will anything change now? Can we be saved?

- Frank L. Kahl

Samurai Song


When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.


When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.


When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.


When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.


When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.


When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.


Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.


- Robert Pinsky

Give Us Courage

Give us courage, gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare us to our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.
If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come, that we be brave in peril,
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates
of death, loyal and loving to one another.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

A Meditation In Time Of War



For one throb of the artery,
While on that old grey stone I Sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate fantasy.


- William Butler Yeats

Instructions for Living The Next 24 Hours


Wake up. This is most important. Asleep,/
It easy to fall into belief, opinion or, worse,/
Certainty. Put one foot in front of the other,/
Crawl, if you cannot walk. Inhabiting the body/
Keeps you awake. Suit up./
It's fine to be naked if that's what's called for,/
But mostly, casual dress will suffice to clothe one/
In life's necessary humility. Show up,/
Living requires presence. More will be revealed/
As needed, if needed./
Tell the truth. With practice, this gets easier. /
When tired, rest. When rested,/
Wake up.


- Rebecca del Rio

Great Cathedrals


Before a date, my college roommate
Used to drive his candy-apple red Camaro
Down to the car wash and spend the afternoon
Washing, waxing, vacuuming it,
Detailing the chrome strips, buffing the fenders,
Spraying the big expensive tires
With their raised white lettering


That said something like Intruder
Or Marauder, with a silicone spray
Until they were slick and dark as sex.
He polished that car as if each caress,
Each pass of the chamois, each loving
Stroke of the terry cloth would increase,


By measurable degrees,
The likelihood that in the immaculate
Front seat, with its film of freshly applied
Vinyl cleaner, at the end of a cul-de-sac
Somewhere above the campus,
She would consent to be rubbed
And buffed just as lovingly.


We do what we can,
And if God is no more impressed
By the cathedral at Chartres
than by a righteously clean and cherry
Camaro, at least He can't say
We haven't tried


With all our might to conceal our fear
That we have little else to offer
Than stained glass or polished chrome,
The elbow grease of our good intentions.


So I'm happy to see
That in the Christmas card photo he sent
Mark stands, balding now,
With a dignified gut, a pretty wife,
And a couple of nice-looking kids, in front
Of the great cathedral
Like the sweet vision of a future
He'd been vouchsafed one day
Long ago, through Turtle Wax
On a gleaming hubcap.


- George Bigere

Bi-Focal

Sometimes up out of this land
a legend begins to move.
Is it a coming near
of something under love?




Love is of the earth only,
the surface, a map of roads
leading wherever go miles
or little bushes nod.




Not so the legend under,
fixed, inexorable,
deep as the darkest mine
the thick rocks won't tell.




As fire burns the leaf
and out of the green appears
the vein in the center line
and the legend veins under there,




So, the world happens twice—
once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.


- William Stafford

Sometimes


if you move carefully
through the forest


breathing
like the ones
in the old stories


who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,


you come
to a place
whose only task


is to trouble you with tiny
but frightening requests


conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.


Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and


to stop what you are becoming
while you do it,


questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,


questions
that have patiently
waited for you,


questions
that have no right
to go away.


- David Whyte

There’s a Certain Slant of Light


There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —


Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —


None may teach it — Any —
’Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —


When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —




- Emily Dickinson

The Gaze

"The reverence of gaze," I heard him say.

The words caught me.
Reverence?
Gaze?
Have I ever done that?
Can I do that?

Looking as if to see God,
in the object,
in the thing?

In the yellow and green caterpillar now moving
across the top of this page?

Do we catch our gods in paintings and books
or in mid-flight or bid-bloom
or in sublime repose
in a patch of sun?

Can I gaze with enough reverence
to see a God
in the object,
in the thing?

In the slowly opening fingers of the homeless
woman's dirty and twisted hand?

Reverence of Gaze!?

God help me!

- Doug von Koss

The Oblong Root
for Adelaide O’Connor Ehret

Going deaf, neither she
nor her hearing daughter
recognize the assertive
unconscious voice
exchanging Pablo Neruda
for oblong root or perhaps
for the medulla oblongata
center of so much involuntary
assertiveness, her very breathing,
the beating of her great heart,
that fountain enabling her daughter,
these words that must mean
something greater than their sounds.

When it comes to shapes oblong,
poets prefer oval over rhomboid.
Because both lampreys and hagfish
possess a fully developed medulla
oblongata, half a billion years of
evolution formed this mother-wisdom
this connection between a great poet
and that most essential ancient
ancestor of her own brain
eventually bestowing the gift
of words on her daughter
who told mother that she’d won
a prize now confused with an oblong root.

This sound the mother hazily heard
might have been the swishing of
a weed growing in dry rocky
pasture land outside Stoneham
near the marble quarry
or vibration off a German yellow sugar beet.
The very pith of plants also referred to
as their “medulla” Yet mathematicians
know the oblong root as an algebraic square.

All such fugues episodically
musically create all richness
all story all myth all family.
Even entire geographies as they exist
for midwestern endodontists who
in 2012 AD estimated
the typical cost of a root canal
in Oblong, Illinois to be
nineteen hundred-thirty-four dollars.

But, in terms of preference,
when it comes to oblong contours
almost all poets and loving mothers
choosing the egg-shape over rhombus,
realize how one thing always leads to another,
even and perhaps especially, this.


- Ed Coletti

Dedicated To Birte and Inger
on their day of U.S. citizenship


To be an American
is to be English, Irish,
Spanish, Swedish, Finnish,
Danish, Ukrainian, Russian,
Asian, German, Frenchman,
Indian, East Indian, African,
Belgium, Arab, Jew.

To be an American
is to have as much faith
in a mantra as in a rosary;
in the Book as in the Bible;
in the Koran as in the Talmud;
in a Crystal as in a Medal;

To be an American
is to have as much faith
in caps as in high cornered hats,
in black robes as in white robes
or no robes at all;
in a woman as in a man;
in a maybe-God, a real-God or no-God at all.

To be an American
is to have faith
that every man, woman and child
is called to a sacred destiny
that no one should ever take away
or abuse their humanity
but to encourage
their search for themselves in others
who are of their image.

To be an American
is above race, color, creed
even when fork-tongues spill spoons of love,
even when the glitter of gold darkens a rainbow,
even when a country under God acts above God
because somewhere in the American vistage
there is the foundation and the gift
that all men and women are created equal.
To be an American
is a place beyond boundaries
beyond vision, but a dream
a possible dream:
when boundaries are dissolved
where perfect is growth
where imperfection is ours
sometimes in a most perfect way.

To be an American
is a place where everything and everyone
is not yet, yet
even though our brightest victories
applaud sciences of war and peace
in the echoes of machinery still making bombs and guns.
We are peoples mixed, melted and split
with differences that make pork in government,
doves and hawks outside of it,
and truth come late.

To be an American
is to grow in confusion of a world
inside part of a world called these United States
...in a milieu of men, women and children.
Where differences are different and similarities are
never different; that each and everyone needs
very little in life; a place to eat,
a place to sleep,
a place to die,
and a lot of loving in between.

To be an American
is to be you in another place,
next door to a million, million neighbors
who live in the confusion of a World
inside part of the world
whose country makes them not
but wherein they make the country.
Now you are a part of that people,
you are "WE THE PEOPLE.'


- Bill McGee

Poem for Change


Go into the next room and look
into the mirror hanging there.
What do you see? Snow
on the passes, a serene
and empty sky. . .
Your own face, reflecting
the ways of Time, or perhaps
the face of another, forgotten
or long familiar, beyond
knowing. Light
the candles, watch the flames
rise up and dance,
and when they die, see
the shapes the wax takes
as it cools.


We all want signs.
We read our dreams, look
for the meaning of leaves
falling, birds calling, shadows
turning in the light.
But you must sleep without questions.
In the morning you will set off,
letting the journey take you,
trusting the hand that guides you.
Your way is one among many,
you must follow its thread.
You will not become tangled or lost.
At the end you will find
what you came for - you will know
as soon as you see it: the face


looking out of your mirror,
calling you on


- Wendy McVicker

The Art of Disappearing




The moon that broke on the fencepost will not hold.


Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.


The house you grew up in; its eaves; its attic will not hold.


The still lives and the Botticellis will not hold.


The white peaches in the bowl will not hold.


Something is always about to happen.


You get married, you change your name,


and the sun you wore like a scarf on your wrist has vanished.


It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;


imperatives will not still it – no stay or wait or keep


to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.


So tell the car idling in the street to go on;


tell the skirmish of chesspieces to go on;


tell the scraps of paper, the lines to go on.


It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,


that means the days are getting shorter.


And the dark water flows endlessly on.


- Sarah Holland-Batt

The Laughter Of Women


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


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


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


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


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


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


- Lisel Mueller

Poem for South African Women


Commemoration of the 40,000 women and children who,
August 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against
the “dompass” in the capital of apartheid. Presented at The
United Nations, August 9, 1978.


Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world


The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire


And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye


And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea


we are the ones we have been waiting for


- June Jordan


from Passion (1980)
and from Directed by Desire. The Collected Poems of June Jordan.
Copyright 2005 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust

Finding The Way


At the edge of the road
walking in the tracks of deer
on Bolinas Mesa,
above foliage so dense
everything becomes
one thing

slowing
to the slowness of the snake
crossing the path. When
heaven breathes it knows,
its whole body waving with wind.
It is good to be that sensitive.


now, stop with the trees, and see

morning glories rising like butterflies
from the bushes
on cloud white wings,

Miwoks
still
here,

arising from places that cannot hold,
like the moon.


- Judith Stone

Reading Plato


I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched


into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,


or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to


love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead


opaquely clean as a bottle's bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was


leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,


so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat's call at dawn or the face


reflected on a coffee machine's chrome side,
the pencil's curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor's square


of afternoon light another page I couldn't know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover's wings spreading through the soul


like flames on a horizon, it isn't so much light
I think about, but the back's skin cracking
to let each wing's nub break through,


the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.


- Rick Barot