Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front


Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy somethin
they will call you. When they wnat you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

- Wendell Berry

Imagine The Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
- Martin Espada

Thanks Larry!!

One of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets. I've read this over and over for many years, and it always inspires, and unfortunately always seems so insightful about the state of the world.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die...

---

Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by,
I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."

Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”

Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow,
due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

- Kenneth Koch

I Call Your Name

Before dawn I begin naming
the ten thousand things, one-
by-one, touching each with my mind
as they take their place in this world.
Orion, Cassiopeia, the moon hanging
like a scimitar over the horizon’s edge,
and the milky swoosh arching over,
all these find their places in the predawn sky.
Soon I call the crow out of the black nest
and the jay, blue against the rose light.
Then come the tall pines, needles and cones
and bark plates blackened from last year’s fire.
The soft whisper of the wind
rustling the dry oak leaves
and stirring the spiny holly
waken with the early light.
When the sun comes up, my words rush
to fill the land and space with forms,
lines, and shadows defining each thing
with its proper name and lineage.
Where are you in all these words?
I call your name to awake you
from the lures of the dark knight.
I call your name. Come to me.
*
*
-*Newton Smith

A Chunk of Amethyst

Held up to the window light the Amethyst has
elegant corridors, that give and take light. The discipline
of its many planes suggest that there is no use trying to live
forever. Its exterior is jagged, but in the inner house all is
in order. Its corridors become ledges, solidified thoughts that
pass each other.

This chunk of Amethyst is a cool thing, hard as a
dragon's tongue. The sleeping times of the whole human race
lie hidden there. When the fingers fold the chunk into the
palm, the palm hears organ music, the low notes that makes the
sins of the whole congregation resonate, and catches the
criminal five miles away with a tinge of doubt.

With all its planes, it turns four or five faces toward
us at once, and four or five meanings enter the mind.

The exhilaration we felt as children returns...We feel the
wind on the face as we go down hill, the sled's speed
increasing.

- Robert Bly

The Future


For God’s sake, be done
with this jabber of “a better world.”
What blasphemy! No “futuristic”
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.


- Wendell Berry

To Say Nothing But Thank You


All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.

- Jeanne Lohmann

Just This


When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven


- W.S. Merwin

Upon The Fall Of Troy

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...1_12-49-44.png

Nothing occurs this morning,
nothing save the near drowning of Odysseus,
who keeps pressing on nonetheless
until, under the tangled bower
of the boughs of the wild and the tame
twin olives, he covers himself with a duff of leaves,
and grey-eyed Athena grants him rest.

Let us then dream with Odysseus
the rest of our lives,
as he did upon such parlous storm.
The door will open
and all our daughters pour in.
And thus the plain day begins.

I hope I wish you well as
I bury my nose in my affairs.
Odd jobs to be done about this place,
A thing or two to write
and the chain of old responsibilities.

If you think the chores and itches of Job
are required, sit down and have
this tea with me. Mercy also is a sacred cup.
It empties suffering. And peace
is neither tedious nor bland.

What burned the capitol down
is long over the horizon.
The earthquake shock trembled mountains,
I can tell you that. But I neither
remember nor recall the indulgence.

So settle with me here. The dogs
may scramble up our knees
and we may forget what we meant to say.
This smile, this smile may depart when we must write:

“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.”
It strikes us dumb, our systems shake
and bow down under the heavy news
of the end of the love of our lives.
Words that tell us, yes, there is nothing left to come.
We weep so deeply. Because that, that is the final tremor.

- Bruce Moody

Tourists

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

-*Yehuda Amichai

INVOCATION

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,

to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing

solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles

we hold in our mouths help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world

be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,

the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers

be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.

-- Jeanne Lohmann

lluminated by The Light


It could be imagined
That a ship, sailing north to Newport with a cargo of sugar and molasses, was shipwrecked on Gay Head.*

It is conceivable
When the ship broke up, the sugar dissolved, the casks of molasses sank, that the Wampanoag salvaged everything that didn't float away, even the ballast stones.

It could be
That the ballast stones from a New England slave ship were the foundation of the first Gay Head Light.

Possibly
They used 340 ballast stones, one for each slave captured in Madagascar, sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic, and sold in the Caribbean.*

Historians say
The shipwreck would have been a disaster to Newport's two dozen distilleries, wanting sugar and molasses to turn into rum, to*ship out to Africa, to trade for more slaves.

Whereas
The Southern states with vast arable tracts to farm needed slaves, the Northern states, with poor soil and good harbors, looked to the sea.*

Evidently
It was easier to catch people and sell them than it was to catch whales and boil them on board.*

Records show*
Newport had 150 ships dedicated, whole or in part, to the slave trade in 1750. The economy of New England was based on shipping. Shipping meant slaving, whole or in part.

It is said
Everyone profited one way or another; rope makers, tanners, coopers, sail makers, provisioners like cattlemen and farmers, candle makers, vintners, potters, weavers.*Everyone had dirty hands; the Faneuils, the Browns, the Whipples, the Cabots.*Ezra Stiles, while President of Yale, imported slaves.*

Unquestionably
Ships can't be permitted to sink virtually within sight of home port. A light house at Gay Head was essential.

After all,
Business is business.

It is recorded
That America's most noble names endorsed the Gay Head Light. From Nantucket, a Coffin requested it. George Washington approved it. Alexander Hamilton funded it. Paul Revere was tinsmith.*

It is established
That more than half the American ships involved in the African slave trade were out of Rhode Island. Over a span of two hundred years, Newport ships trafficked 300,000 slaves.

It would seem
On the rum leg*of the Triangle Trade, ships sailed up Vineyard Sound, their way made safe by the Gay Head Light.

New England*
Rectitude and pious protests not withstanding, the Gay Head Light, three whites and one red, illuminated the long night of slavery, and waited with indifference for dawn.

-*Julie Jaffe

Lute Music

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year’s end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

- Kenneth Rexroth

A Thousand Year of Healing

From whence my hope, I cannot say,
except it grows in the cells of my skin,
in my envelope of mysteries
it hums.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of the earth,
it whispers.
Beneath the wail and dissonance in the world,
hope's song grows.
Until I know that with this turning
we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
one thousand years of healing!

Winged ones and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all the swimming creatures,
even we, wary two-leggeds,
hum, and call, and create the Changing Song.
We remake all our relations.
We convert our minds to the Earth.
In this turning time
we finally learn to chime and blend,
attune our our voices; sing the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin the new habit,
getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.

-*Susa Silvermarie

A Great Need

Out

Of a great need

We are all holding hands

And climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,

The terrain around here

Is

Far too

Dangerous

For

That.

-*Hafiz of Shiraz

(translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

The Exchange*

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he'd guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a double-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, inside
the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.

-*Ron Rash

Epic*

It’s you I’d like to see Greece again with
You I’d like to take to bed of cyclamen
You know I nurse a certain myth
about myself *************that I descend
de tribus d’origine asiatique
and am part Thracian or Macedonian
cleaving to a Hellenic mystique
after centuries’ migration inland

a full moon ************rising over the Acropolis
I can repeat the scene *******this time à deux
as then I had no one to kiss
slicing halloumi amid the hullabaloo
of a rooftop taverna in   July
The doors that opened to lovers
pulled like tree roots from darkness * * * *
close upon us now like book covers

The alcove in which we embrace
is cool with brilliant tile
and weirded by a dove’s note ******chase
of ouzo with Uzi *********junta-style
History makes its noise *****we duck
till it passes *****Love we think is our due
Not we think like the epoch
the unchosen thing we’re wedded to

-*Ange Mlinko

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

https://img838.imageshack.us/img838/673/9juc.jpg
Maya Angelou

I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.


- Maya Angelou

Ancient Continuities


When we change our watchbands
or our shoes every day, don a new
pair of jeans in the morning, build
an entire world economy on faster
replacement; when we wring just an
instant's interest from transient models
of now, will we watch passively
as one age of consumption succumbs
to the next, the next?
If I had our foremothers' wisdom,
I'd feel our drumming heartbeats
link us with Earth's womb
(so nearly emptied now, nearly sealed)
and with the Moon, our ancient
center of time. Only half our mothers'
wisdom remains on the shelf, to be quartered,
quartered and served like a slice of pizza,
separated from the whole round crust.


- Andrea English

Comprehension

I do not comprehend why mountain reaches for sky with such exuberance,
Why valley curls along the riverbed with such divinity,
Why ravine descends deeper, sometimes, than my despair,
Why hills roll so sweetly out like waves and make me want to walk them,
swim them, dive them,
own them.
They say it’s geography
/geology
/geometry
/human nature
or some combination of all the –ologies and –ometries
and therapies
but I suspect something deeper in the architecture;
like: everything is a reflection of everything else,
like: we are living in a kind of funhouse of mirrors,
that isn’t always fun—
that should be painfully obvious by now—
and for that, mountain reflects sky
reflects valley
reflects river
reflects ravine
reflects despair
reflects divinity
reflects the ink spill of night that hold the stars and galaxies above.

We are the tealeaves in our own fortune’s cup,
and the stars mountains and galaxies
are all steeping with us
in this warm ambrosia;
they, casting our die
as we, cast theirs,
spelling each other’s fortunes
like rain spells the flowers’
or Spring spells Winter’s.

- Gary Turchin

Fear

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my children.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the soldiers
who burned down my house, beheaded my children,
raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.
I give you back to those who stole the
food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold
these scenes in front of me and I was born
with eyes that can never close.

I release you
I release you
I release you
I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.
I am not afraid to rejoice.
I am not afraid to be black.
I am not afraid to be white.
I am not afraid to be hungry.
I am not afraid to be full.
I am not afraid to be hated.
I am not afraid to be loved.

to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart

But come here, fear
I am alive and you are so afraid
of dying.

- Joy Harjo

Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born.


- Ikkyu Sojun

Searching for the Dharma

You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the Dharma.
So many long days in the archives, copying, copying.

The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung
make heavy baggage.

Here! I've picked you a bunch of wildflowers.
Their meaning is the same
but they're much easier to carry.

- Xu Yun

I Got Heaven...

I swear that, in Gardena, on a moonlit suburban street, There are souls that twirl like kites lashed to the wrists of the living And spirits who tumble in a solemn limbo between 164th And the long river of stars to Amida’s Paradise in the West. As though I belonged, I’ve come from my life of papers and exile To walk among these penitents at the Festival of the Dead, The booths full of sellers hawking rice cakes and candied plums, All around us the rhythmic chant of min’yo bursting through loudspeakers, Calling out the mimes and changes to all who dance. I stop at a booth and watch a man, deeply tanned from work outdoors, Pitch bright, fresh quarters into blue plastic bowls. He wins a porcelain cat, a fishnet bag of marbles, Then a bottle of shōyu, and a rattle shaped like tam-tam he gives to a child. I hear the words of a Motown tune carry through the gaudy air …got sunshine on a cloudy day…got the month of May… As he turns from the booth and re-enters the River of Heaven— These dancers winding in brocades and silk sleeves, A faithlit circle briefly as warm in the summer night.

- Garret Hongo

Taking Back The Moon

I am taking back the moon
for the lunatics,
the lovers,
and the poets.

The real estate agents
may notice a gap in the night sky,
have to put away their signs.

The scientists can measure
the diamater of this darker
darkness,
triangulate its distance from earth,
and conclude that what's missing
must be the moon.

But I have it right here
under my arm,
wrapped in a notebook
leaking light,
and am coming toward you
with a poem it helped me write.
I pull it out and read by the moon's light:

The Swimmer

He dives into the moon
from the pier on the lake,
hits his target dead center;
and, coming up for air,
finds none.

- Duane Ackerson

Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings


So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.


So that in jail he will have the time to read
How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode
The king’s wrist died of a common cold,
And learn that chivalry persists,
And what first felt like an insult to the flesh
Was the blank ‘o’ of love.
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.


So that no empty court will make a  judge recall
Ice fishing on some overcast bay,
Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought
To be an interesting law,
The kind of thing that no one can obey,
A law that whispers “Break me.”
Let the crows roost & caw.
A good judge is an example to us all.


So that the patrolman can still whistle
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth
And even show some faint gesture of respect
While he cuffs the suspect,
Not ungently, & says things like ok,
That’s it, relax,
It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist,
Lean back just a little, against me.


- Larry Levis

Ulysses: Endgame

Hero? Why is it then I tremble,

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...8_14-35-17.png

alone at night, when dead men
with desolate eyes wander
the dark corners of my dreams?

In sweat of sleep, I see Achilles
felled by a single blow to his heel
and feel my own life hanging
by a thread from Penelope’s loom.

With every rise of sun, I cough up
blood and ash from smoldering Troy,
my spittle a blot of a once great city
and its people lost to all of time.

At long last, I set sail for Ithaca, but
my knees quake to think of Penelope,
waiting with her weavings of lonely
days and unravelings of lonelier nights.

What will she read in the red script
of my eyes? The slaughter of women
and children? Hector’s obscene death?
Old Queen Hecuba on her knees?

I must scrub the stench of blood
from my pores, wash Circe’s scent
from my tangled hair, take care only
Penelope’s name falls from my lips.

I will swear to her, if I could begin
again, I would choose to stay and raise
our boy, tend the fields, and grow old
with her by my side.

And yet, as I vow to speak these words,
my hands grow restless for heft of sword
and shield and I long for the company
of old companions at my side.


- Patrice Warrender

Whatever It Is

Whatever it is
No matter how fast or how deeply you breathe
The colors on the back of your eyelids
The length of your neck or the tilt of your back
Let it go.

Whether it’s wondering what you want
Or how long you’ve been doing this or what you
Think you must learn in this life
Let it go.

No matter if you will be going to a movie tonight
Or whether space extends infinitely in all directions
Whether you will ever have a moment with no end
Let it all go.

No matter if you do not understand at all
Or think you must dissect it until nothing is left
No matter if you are having the experience you desire
Or merely having the experience you are having.
Let it go.

No matter if you ever find pervasive joy
Underneath whatever you mistake for sorrow
Or whether you wish to start this life over again
This is no time to wonder about time.

This is no time to wonder how you got here
Or how many lifetimes it has taken before
You can brandish your luminosity as if it were a light.
It is not yours. Or anyone’s at all.
So let it go.

No matter if you can speak your truth or even know it
Whether you like it or not that is not yours either
So speak your truth as if it belongs to everyone
Because there is no speaker and nothing spoken
And therefore nothing to let go.

You came into my life from a land I had not imagined
Speaking a language I did not know that I could hear
But now that I can hear it spoken in my own heart

I let go of you every day as if it is the last.


- Gary Horvitz

This World

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...0_14-20-26.png

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

- Mary Oliver

DOWN BY THE SALLEY GARDENS


Down by the salley gardens
my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens
with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish,
with her would not agree.


In a field by the river
my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy,
as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish,
and now am full of tears.


- William Butler Yeats

Dawn Outside The City Walls

You can see the face of everything, and it is white—
plaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold—
turned to the east. Oh closeness to life!
Hardness of life! Like something
in the body that is animal—root, slag-ends—
with the soul still not set well there—
and mineral and vegetable!
Sun standing stiffly against man,
against the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall!
—False joy, because you are merely
in time, as they say, and not in the soul!

The entire sky taken up
by moist and steaming heaps,
a horizon of dung piles.
Sour remains, here and there,
of the night. Slices
of the green moon, half-eaten,
crystal bits from false stars,
plaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly
sky-blue. The birds
not really awake yet, in the raw moon,
streetlight nearly out.
Mob of beings and things!
—A true sadness, because you are really deep
in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!

- Juan Ramón Jiménez
(Translated by Robert Bly)

Calling All Women

Calling all sisters. Calling all
Righteous sisters.
Calling all women. To steal away
To our secret place. Have a meeting
Face to face. Look at the facts
And determine our pace. Calling all
Women.
We want to reach – first and second
And
Third world women
Come together!
Women in and outside the power structure –
Working women,
Welfare women,
Women who feel alienated and isolated
Women who are all frustrated
Women who have given up – women – women
Questioning women – women
Unpolarized and unorganized.
Ostracized. Tired of being penalized
Come help us start to bridge the gaps
Racial, cultural, or generation
We want some action and veneration.
These men, these men they
Just ain’t doing it.
They’ve had hundreds of years
Now they ’bout to ruin it.
Kitchen, office, ex-prison women
Old and young and middle-aged women
Make this scene
Oh yes, and bring your lunch!
Problems, problems common problems
That we make and cause each other
Sister, daughter, old grandmother
Female child you can bring your little brother
Take the subway, grad a cab
Saddle your mule
Bike it, limo
Take a choo-choo, fly
Or pick ‘em up and lay ‘em down.
Socialism, capitalism, communism
Feminism, womanism, lesbianism
Here-and-now or futurism
We just can’t afford a schism
We got to get together or die.
Now is the time for an evolution
Let’s all search and find a solution
For how we’ll make it to the next revolution
Or die.
Oh yes. And don’t forget your lunch!

- Ruby Dee
(1923-2014)

All ThingsThe brief secrets are still here,
and the light has come back.
The word remember touches my hand,
But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel
Against the occluded sky.
All of the little names sink down,
weighted with what is invisible,
But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair.


There isn’t much time, in any case.
There isn’t much left to talk about
as the year deflates.
There isn’t a lot to add.
Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels
Wherever a thing appears,
Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable
in their mute and glittering garb.


All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us
out of the
Blue Ridge.
All afternoon the leaves have scuttled
Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.
And now the evening is over us,
Small slices of silence
running under a dark rain,
Wrapped in a larger.
- Charles Wright
(America's new Poet Laureate)

Dad

you
were of a generation
who dressed up for
doctor appointments
airline flights
dinner on Sunday night
your operation

now
I take these clothes
home with me
sad new shoes
your good black trousers
a black v neck sweater
a fresh white shirt

you
were of a generation
who revered doctors
loved the flag
found belief easy

you
a good patient
unfailingly polite
had corny jokes
for orderlies
nurses
people in white coats

now
you are gone
and I am left
holding a bag


- Les Bernstein

For a Father

The longer we live,
The more of your presence
We find, laid down,
Weave upon weave
Within our lives.

The quiet constancy of your gentleness
Drew no attention to itself,
Yet filled our home
With a climate of kindness
Where each mind felt free
To seek its own direction.

As the fields of distance
Opened inside childhood,
Your presence was a sheltering tree
Where out fledgling hearts could rest.

The earth seemed to trust your hands
As they tilled the soil, put in the seed,
Gathered together the lonely stones.

Something in you loved to inquire
In the neighborhood of air,
Searching its transparent rooms
For the fallen glances of God.

The warmth and wonder of your prayer
Opened our eyes to glimpse
The subtle ones who
Are eternally there.

Whenever, silently, in off moments,
The beauty of the whole thing overcame you,
You would gaze quietly out upon us,
The look from your eyes
Like a kiss alighting on skin.

There are many things
We could have said,
But words never wanted
To name them;
And perhaps a word
That is quietly sensed
Across the air
In another’s heart
Becomes the inner companion
To one’s own unknown.

- John O’Donohue

Just Now I Heard My Father Singing

Just now I heard my father singing
an old, old song he used to sing
when his hands were busy
with something, as mine were until
I heard that voice: he has been dead
for eight years!

Just now I heard my father's laughter.
That, too, came from my mouth.


- Alden Nowlan

A Praise

His memories lived in the place
like fingers locked in the rock ledges
like roots. When he died
and his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
of his thought, let his kindness
go ahead of me. Though I do not escape
the history barbed in my flesh,
certain wise movements of his hands,
the turns of his speech
keep with me. His hope of peace
keeps with me in harsh days,
the shell of his breath dimming away
three summers in the earth.

- Wendell Berry

All The Difficult Hours and Minutes

All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

- Jane Hirshfield

Although the wind

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

- Izumi Shikibu
(Translated by Jane Hirshfield )

Poem: By The Wild-Haired Corn


I don’t know
if the sunflowers
are angels always,
but surely sometimes.
Who, even in heaven,
wouldn’t want to wear,
for awhile,
such a seed-face
and brave spine,
a coat of leaves
with so many pockets—
and who wouldn’t want
to stand, for a summer day,
in the hot fields,
in the lonely country
of the wild-haired corn?
This much I know,
when I see the bright
stars of their faces,
when I’m strolling nearby,
I grow soft in my speech,
and soft in my thoughts,
and I remember how everything will be everything else,
by and by.
- Mary Oliver

en el solsticio veraniego/on the Summer Solstice

(y a mis queridos cangrejos/& to my dear crabs)


Cancer

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...2_12-43-05.png

The crab longs,
after the long day,
to tear from the sky
that coin of cold silver
that is the moon.
Its eyes are ruby beads
& in its entrails
it keeps a sensitive pearl
which it longs to carry very deep,
very deep
to the cardinal point of the waters,
the primordial depths of the sea.

- Rafael Jesús González


Cáncer

El cangrejo anhela,
después del largo día,
arrancar del cielo
esa moneda de plata fría
que es la luna.
Sus ojos son cuentas de rubí
y en las entrañas
guarda un perla sensitiva
que anhela llevar muy hondo,
muy hondo
al punto cardinal del agua,
al fondo primordial del mar.

Toda Guerra es por Tierra


All war is for land, though
it knocks at our doors dressed
in austere religious robes or cradling
law books in the thoughtless
crook of its arm.

The Land is wordless, she welcomes
lovers, rapists, pilgrims and psychopaths.
She opens, accepts destiny
Dependent on her children’s
memory of the sweet root
of suckle playing on their palates.

Warriors, her children, bewildered
and dumb look to the clerics,
to politicians, poor substitutes
for gods—perverted, cruel understudies
to the One who holds them all.

They seek Her without gazing
beneath their heavy, brutal boots.

She is patient, sorrowful,
She is here.

- Rebecca del Rio

Bird Dance

Each morning I observe
birds coming and going
outside on my deck

I sit out in the sun and sip my ginger tea
and notice them tentative in the trees
all around- maybe one or two stealthfully
sneaking in quickly for a seed or two

When I retreat to watch from inside,
writing at my table gazing out
through the double sliding glass doors,
they eagerly arrive-
Singles-usually a large blue scrubjay or
a black and white red-capped woodpecker
who chases everyone else away-the bullies
The smaller ones- towhees, finches, chickadees
and more mostly brown with a touch of orange or yellow
come in pairs or trios or more.
Now and then a hummingbird hovers circling around
and sips at a nearby flower

The winged adventurers are calling
their family and friends to the party-
Several on the ledge, a couple on the feeder,
one at a time in the nearby hanging birdbath-
a sip from the edge or a dunk plunging in and out,
the water glistening on their flapping wings.
They chirp and chatter calling to each other
like welcome friends-

I have my field guides at the ready trying
to learn a few of their names-
Why can’t they announce themselves on arrival?!
Good morning giant lady, I’m a Red-breasted Nuthatch.
Hello there, we’re Black-headed Grosbeaks.
Hey, look out! I’m a Downy Woodpecker.

Daily I stumble along, I would be an Audubon Society disgrace-
I can’t seem to identify them and remember their names
BUT I enjoy the life energy they bring and share
Reminding me that
Yes, I’m alive and grateful to be here.


- Carla Musik

This poem touches me today since I am realizing that my birdfeeder, and the filling of it, is not in accord with nature's balance and God's creation of it. I am seeing how my desire to feed the birds is based on a selfish wish to see & enjoy (& so I feed) Certain birds ~ not the scrub jays, for example, but the house & gold finches, yes.

So the birdfeeder I employ doesn't make room for jays & other large birds to get to the seeds. Then also, I am realizng, the birds squabble w/ each other, competing for placement on the feeder, whereas in trees and on grasses, there is Plenty Of Room for every one; No need to bicker & peck & chase each other away.

I am feeling that my wish to enjoy the birds in this way is damaging to their otherwise perfectly harmonious life! Including, they become dependent on my feeding of them, morning after morning, perched, looking, waiting for the feeder to be filled... instead of finding seeds, worms, nats and others, God's creation offers all birds, in abundance.

I appreciate this forum... a place to respond to the poems Larry abundantly offers us! Thank You,

To feed or not to feed ? …

Should you feed the birds?

It is a little ironic that all nature enthusiasts know that it is “bad” to feed the animals … they become dependent on the food, and in some cases will become a nuisance or dangerous, prying open cars or breaking into homes to get more food. Then the animal has to be put down or moved to a new habitat. But that sort of bad outcome is more common with, say, bears than it is with, say, chickadees. The irony here is that bird lovers, who are always nature enthusiasts, do not seem to balk at setting up bird feeders. In fact, approximately on half a million metric tons of seed is put out for the birds in the United States and the United Kingdom.

This must have an effect on the birds, for better or worse. Two studies just published by the same research team address this issue.

To read the article in full, go to https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2...eed-the-birds/

My Mother’s Lost Heart

Loses her heart in life’s trials,
Leaves behind her a closet of nightmares
No one born of her declares
The belly of her predator full.

A loving funeral with naught a tear.
Come Emily D. with your gravity,
Lend words to capture the depravity
Mother/daughter disbanded wear.

Human beings are relentless.
We demand heaven or fall into hell,
Limbo for her stillborn no sell:
That soul insult found her address.

Her youngest lived the play for all to see,
Shakespeare’s depth in that tragedy.
From that one’s husband flowed the grief
Full enough to embrace life’s thief.


- Brian McSweeney

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Ronaldo:

To feed or not to feed ? …

Should you feed the birds?

It is a little ironic that all nature enthusiasts know that it is “bad” to feed the animals … they become dependent on the food, and in some cases will become a nuisance or dangerous, prying open cars or breaking into homes to get more food. Then the animal has to be put down or moved to a new habitat. But that sort of bad outcome is more common with, say, bears than it is with, say, chickadees. The irony here is that bird lovers, who are always nature enthusiasts, do not seem to balk at setting up bird feeders. In fact, approximately on half a million metric tons of seed is put out for the birds in the United States and the United Kingdom.

This must have an effect on the birds, for better or worse. Two studies just published by the same research team address this issue.

To read the article in full, go to https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2...eed-the-birds/

---

For anyone who is following this conversation, perhaps you'll join me, listening to a seminar on Creating Loving Eco Systems, with AJ Miller (also known far & wide as Jesus) facilitating. I love & appreciate the understanding he brings to this equation -- https://youtu.be/ndtLmM20hH4https://www.waccobb.net/forums/images/youtube.png

Julie (who posted yesterday's response about feeding the birds), wow, the cumulus light of sky this morning!!

​The Call
(The first and last lines of the poem are from Tennyson’ s “Ulysses”)

“Though much is taken, much abides,”
speaks old Ulysses,
home at last but yearning still
for new adventures and a farther shore

as I, becalmed
in this airless city,
yearn for mountains and sea,
space and silence.

Oh, a mad restlessness is on me!

I will not be Penelope,
unravelling
the work of my days
while awaiting – what? – revelation?

Like the old man,
(and at his age, too)
I will count what still abides
and plan my escape.

I hear him shout
from afar,
as if through a shell held to my ear:
“Tis not too late
to seek a newer world!”

- Nina Mermey Klippel

may alchemy spin pain into love
in this moment
may the love course through me
weave fear into gratitude
tendrils touching and being touched by others
with this breath
beaming
brimming
boundless cloth shimmering
deep
full
unfurling with grace
gossamer garden bed
growing courage and kindness
tucking us in with tenderness

- Andrea Marquette