Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Ice Cream Truck Mystery


Every summer night, although the fog turns
evenings cool in Northern California,
one dilapidated ice cream truck,
pink as the strawberry
in a block of Neapolitan,
putts down my street.

Its driver is an old man in a turban,
quite serene,
whom I make out to be a Sikh.
Its tune the traditional:
“Turkey in the Straw,”
always of mysterious relevance to ice cream,
which repeats on a calliope
with a monotony like migraine.

I have never known a soul to buy his goods:
not parent, child, the adolescent boys
out shooting baskets in the neighbor’s driveway
nor the girls next door
pretending not to watch the boys.

And so I’d like to think
this is the ice cream truck of evening prayer:
his one last daily meditation on
the Omnipresent in all neighborhoods.
He practices compassion and good will
in the face of apathy and bad music,
careful of the children,
circumventing potholes,
ego, anger, lust, attachment, greed.

As stars come out
in the branches of the bo trees,
alone as Jesus,
riding in his pink mystery,
this one man’s caravan drives by,
recalling the Unknowable
for all of us.

- Laurie Kirkpatrick

Feathered Alignment


When gun point ideologies
breathe their final blood stained sigh
and the glare of mourning the broken world
fades to a darkling pink
the way white petals sometimes do

When greed has crushed the last bed of ferns
held in feathered alignment
by only a faintly wind in the once was forest
will you remember then to love the child
whose no machine and inborn tongue
could lead us home?


- Cynthia Poten

I Have News for You




There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood


and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.


There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable


and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings


do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives


as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;


and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.


Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,


who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.


Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.


I have news for you-
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room


and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.


- Tony Hoagland

Ode to the Oat


Ah, most noble oat,
How grand a grain you are!
The stuff of brawn and bone,
of Scottish Highlander.


Your golden seeds
are pummeled flat,
and soaked and cooked as meal.
Stick to the ribs
(and pots and bowls) . . .
Endurance is so real!


The rosy glow
of children's cheeks
Betrays the breakfast grain.
A good day's start
will last two weeks
before they eat again.


- Karl Frederick

Constant


We live for constants,
Rain in winter, the cat
Curled like a furry comma
On the edge of the bed.


Sometimes, many times
These don’t come, instead
There is drought, the father dies,
The mother grows old.


The constant is this:
The mind insists, persists in the insane
Circle of creation from chaos.
Make order of mystery.


“Listen to me,” it shouts.
So we listen.
Constant chatter, constant need
Growing like a curse.


The constant is this:
Life is chaos, disintegration, blooming
Anew into order and collapsing
Again to blossom into something more perfect,
Then chaos, disintegration and on.


We watch helplessly, entranced
Like the magician’s audience,
The hypnotist’s mark.


Nothing to do but join hands,
Bow heads, say blessings
To the capricious, wild
original god.


- Rebecca del Rio

A Blessing for a Wedding
Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
or someone you will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
- Jane Hirshfield

Honey At The Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle soft as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table


and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,


grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until


deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,


you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees — a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything
lost is found.


- Mary Oliver

I will be traveling until mid-July so this will be the last poem I post until I return. May you all stay safe and at ease.
Larry


Start Close In

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's questions,
don't let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another's voice
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.



- David Whyte

On behalf of myself and the many Waccos who are nourished and inspired by the poems you share with us daily, thank you, Larry, thank you! :waccosun:

May your travels be full of wonder!

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

I will be traveling until mid-July so this will be the last poem I post until I return. May you all stay safe and at ease.
Larry

---

The Return


Some day, if you are lucky,
you'll return from a thunderous journey
trailing snake scales, wing fragments
and the musk of Earth and moon.


Eyes will examine you for signs
of damage, or change
and you, too, will wonder
if your skin shows traces


of fur, or leaves,
if thrushes have built a nest
of your hair, if Andromeda
burns from your eyes.


Do not be surprised by prickly questions
from those who barely inhabit
their own fleeting lives, who barely taste
their own possibility, who barely dream.


If your hands are empty, treasureless,
if your toes have not grown claws,
if your obedient voice has not
become a wild cry, a howl,


you will reassure them. We warned you,
they might declare, there is nothing else,
no point, no meaning, no mystery at all,
just this frantic waiting to die.


And yet, they tremble, mute,
afraid you've returned without sweet
elixir for unspeakable thirst, without
a fluent dance or holy language
to teach them, without a compass
bearing to a forgotten border where
no one crosses without weeping
for the terrible beauty of galaxies


and granite and bone. They tremble,
hoping your lips hold a secret,
that the song your body now sings
will redeem them, yet they fear


your secret is dangerous, shattering,
and once it flies from your astonished
mouth, they-like you-must disintegrate
before unfolding tremulous wings.


- Geneen Marie Haugen

Welcome back, Larry! No prickly questions here! Just gratitude! :waccosun:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Return

Some day, if you are lucky,
you'll return from a thunderous journey..

---

Soul And The Old Woman

What is the soul? Consciousness. The more awareness,
the deeper the soul, and when

such essence overflows, you feel a sacredness around. It’s
so simple to tell one who

puts on a robe and pretends to be a dervish from
the real thing. We know the taste

of pure water. Words can sound like a poem but not have
any juice, no flavor to

relish. How long do you look at pictures on a latrine
wall? Soul is what draws

you away from those pictures to talk with the old woman
who sits outside by the door

in the sun. She’s half blind, but she has what soul loves
to flow into. She’s kind, she weeps.

She makes quick personal decisions and laughs so easily.


- Jellaludin Rumi
( translated by Coleman Barks)

Bouganvillea


I like the inner lives of the silverware; the fork,
the spoon, the knife. I appreciate
how they each have a different reference toward
god, how the fork is Muslim,
the spoon, like a stone, is Buddhist, how the knife
is Roman Catholic—
always worried, always having
a hard time forgiving people, the knife kneeling
down in Ireland and Africa. In San Francisco
my lamp has become a temple.
Every time I turn it on the light moves out across
the room like a meditation,
like a bell or a robe
the way it covers everything and doesn’t want to
kill. Light is the husband
and everything it touches is its bride, the floor,
the wall, my body,
the bronze installation in Hayes Valley
its bride. The lamp chants
and my clothes, my hat thrown in the corner of the room
chants back: nothing, nothing. In my next life
I’ll have no fingers, no toes. In my next life I’ll be
a bougainvillea. A Buddhist monk
will wake up early on Sunday morning and not be a fork
and not be a knife, he will look down at the girl
sleeping in his bed like a body of water,
he will think about how
he lifted her up like a spoon to his mouth all night, and walk
into the courtyard and pick up the shears
and cut a little part of me, and lie me down next to her mouth
which is breathing heavily and changing all the dark in the room to light.


- Matthew Dickman

Sligo Glen: Walking Out Of Silence


And then, after,
when you'd turned back
by the way you came,
back toward
the mouth of the Glen
you'd entered
noisiliy just an hour before,
calling to the others
and you reached again,
but this time alone
the invisible line
where
you could mark exactly
when you began to hear
the sounds of the road
and the machines and the blank
cries of everyday commerce,
so that for a moment you could
retrace that one single step
back into the Glen
and immerse yourself
instantly
in the quiet
source of revelation
you had felt
only a moment before,


as if under water,
as if slipping back
into the river
of silence running between
the tree lined walls
and then you could practice
leaving and
returning in your own body,
through your own breath,
inward and outward,
descending and
entering and reentering the silence
and shelter of your own
narrow valley of aloneness,
from interiority
to conversation
and back.


So that you suddenly realized
you were given
the complete and utter gift
of your own transparency,


the revelation of your
own ex act boundary with
the world.


The frontier
between silence and speech
exactly
the line you must cross
to give yourself
while saving yourself,


the gleam in your heart
and your eye,
another sun rising,
the old memories alive
after a long night of absence
and the world again
suddenly worth
risking,
worth seeing,
worth innocence,
worth everything.


- David Whyte

God, I love poetry.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Sligo Glen: Walking Out Of Silence


And then, after,
when you'd turned back
by the way you came,
back toward
the mouth of the Glen
you'd entered
noisiliy just an hour before,
calling to the others
and you reached again,
but this time alone
the invisible line
where
you could mark exactly
when you began to hear
the sounds of the road
and the machines and the blank
cries of everyday commerce,
so that for a moment you could
retrace that one single step
back into the Glen
and immerse yourself
instantly
in the quiet
source of revelation
you had felt
only a moment before,


as if under water,
as if slipping back
into the river
of silence running between
the tree lined walls
and then you could practice
leaving and
returning in your own body,
through your own breath,
inward and outward,
descending and
entering and reentering the silence
and shelter of your own
narrow valley of aloneness,
from interiority
to conversation
and back.


So that you suddenly realized
you were given
the complete and utter gift
of your own transparency,


the revelation of your
own ex act boundary with
the world.


The frontier
between silence and speech
exactly
the line you must cross
to give yourself
while saving yourself,


the gleam in your heart
and your eye,
another sun rising,
the old memories alive
after a long night of absence
and the world again
suddenly worth
risking,
worth seeing,
worth innocence,
worth everything.


- David Whyte

---

Losing Steps


1
It's probably a Sunday morning
in a pickup game, and it's clear
you've begun to leave
fewer people behind.


Your fakes are as good as ever,
but when you move
you're like the Southern Pacific
the first time a car kept up with it,


your opponent at your hip,
with you all the way
to the rim. Five years earlier
he'd have been part of the air


that stayed behind you
in your ascendance.
On the sidelines they're saying,
He's lost a step.


2
In a few more years
it's adult night in a gymnasium
streaked with the abrupt scuff marks
of high schoolers, and another step


leaves you like a wire
burned out in a radio.
You're playing defense,
someone jukes right, goes left,


and you're not fooled
but he's past you anyway,
dust in your eyes,
a few more points against you.


3
Suddenly you're fifty;
if you know anything about steps
you're playing chess
with an old, complicated friend.


But you're walking to a schoolyard
where kids are playing full-court,
telling yourself
the value of experience, a worn down


basketball under your arm,
your legs hanging from your waist
like misplaced sloths in a county
known for its cheetahs and its sunsets.


- Stephen Dunn

I have a feeling that wisdom only comes with a decline in power.

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Losing Steps


1
It's probably a Sunday morning...

---

Become Part Of The Truth

When school and mosque and minaret
get torn down, then dervishes
can begin their community.


Not until faithfulness turns into betrayal
and betrayal into trust
can any human being
become part of the truth.


Not until a person dissolves,
can he or she know
what union is.


There is a descent into emptiness.
A lie will not change
the truth with just
talking about it.


While you are still yourself,
you're blind to both worlds.


That ego-drunkenness
will not let you see.
Only when you are cleansed of both,
will you cut the deep roots
of fear and anger.


- Jellaluddin Rumi (Translated by Coleman Barks from The Soul of Rumi)

Stand firmly, sit serenely, mutter profoundly, sing outrageously and dance all the way to your death.


- James Broughton

STUBBORN DONKEY


Silence is a stubborn donkey
whose master turns toward
home again and again
and the ass has his own
destination that even his
god doesn't know.


Do not try to tame the donkey
or the silence
or the master...
turn towards home
and bow to what god
arrives at the well.


- Lizbeth Hamlin

Hands


I should hate to lose them in a freakish accident.
They have brought me much covert pleasure.
Like shell-less crabs;
they have leased their homes, rested as itinerant workers,
travelling between finger grasps.
They have been my living.


Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by hands.
He understood that if you could draw them,
you could shape cathedrals from water.
You could see the inner workings
of a hidden language.


I turn them over, as I would
a page of scripture, eager for more light.
Every pound of flesh takes the strain,
works cantilevers, pulls ropes
just to open them above gravity.


I half expect to see,
engraved on the skin of my palms, little faces,
old lovers, a long dead dog, Da Vinci
smiling between a wrinkled Mona Lisa.
Goya working alone in the uncertain darkness
of a broken life.


Yesterday I spiced ground pork.
As the meat caressed my fingers,
my hands felt like two nursing sows.
Fingers know their mother.
They know that to pray with greasy hands
and an appetite, is a perfect redemption


At times, I want to clean them
like seabirds caught in an oil slick.
Then I remember,
they still miss all my fumbled catches.
They wash me every day, as I wash them.


- Eric Ashford

The English Are So Nice!
The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.
And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.
Americans and French and Germans and so on
they’re all very well
but they’re not really nice, you know.
They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?
That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally—
But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
they don’t really understand—
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just be nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn’t understand.
Just be nice, you know! oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage—
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be.


- D.H. Lawrence

Luminism



And though it was brief, and slight, and nothing
To have been held on to so long, I remember it,
As if it had come firm within, one of the scenes
The mind sees for itself, night after night, only
To part from quickly and without warning. Sunlight
Flooded the valley floor and blazed on the town’s
Westward facing windows. The streets shimmered like rivers,
And trees, bushes, and clouds were caught in the spill,
And nothing was spared, not the couch we sat on
Not the rugs, nor our friends, staring off into space.
Everything drowned in the golden fire. Then Philip
Put down his glass and said: “This hand is just one
In an infinite series of hands. Imagine.”
And that was it. The evening dimmed and darkened
Until the western rim of the sky took on
The purple look of a bruise, and everyone stood
And said what a great sunset it had been.This was a while ago,
And it was remarkable, but something else happened then--
A cry, almost beyond our hearing, rose and rose,
As if across time, to touch us as nothing else would,
And so lightly, we might live out our lives and not know.
I had no idea what it meant until now.


- Mark Strand

Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle


Try to love everything that gets in your way;
The Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin and doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side and
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim past obstacles like a minnow,
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking, Obstacle,
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she'll have that to look at the rest of her life, and
keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren't supposed
to be in the pool at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
may be a young man at a wedding on a boat,
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He'll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he'll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to the larger story,
because if something is in your way, it is
going your way, the way
of all beings: toward darkness, toward light.


- Allison Luterman

Water Shed


The green expanse of duck weed
Parts and there he sits,
Proud - or so I imagine -
In all his feathered irridescence,
Shedding water with neither thought nor effort.


The late Spring rains
Fall on Sonoma Mountain and English Hill,
Dancing down the Laguna and Atascadero Creek.
So Wintergreen becomes Summergold.


But where are salmon, the steelhead,
The pronghorn and the grizzly?


There is so much for us to grieve now,
So much lost that we will never see again.
And yet so much still arising
That we have only begun to dream.


Can we shed despair
As we shed our tears
And see with clearer eyes
The shining form now emerging?


- Larry Robinson

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
- Mary Oliver

Hi Larry,
a poem from my book is similar to yours:

Home

Grief casts a shadow
on the worn linoleum floor,
but there’s sunshine all around
and yellow daffodils in my yard.
A vision emerges from fecund compost
of decaying dreams,
amidst a graveyard with memory tombstones
that mark the dead.
New growth rises from the ashes
of failed pursuits.
This dream is finer and truer than the rest,
and brings a fullness of content
that radiates comfort head to sole.
A lifetime of seeking for my place
has revealed
that home is living in my truth.
May you always feel the bliss
of knowing you are home.

©2004, Star Kissed Shadows, Sher Lianne Christian

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Water Shed


The green expanse of duck weed
Parts and there he sits,
Proud - or so I imagine -
In all his feathered irridescence,
Shedding water with neither thought nor effort.


The late Spring rains
Fall on Sonoma Mountain and English Hill,
Dancing down the Laguna and Atascadero Creek.
So Wintergreen becomes Summergold.


But where are salmon, the steelhead,
The pronghorn and the grizzly?


There is so much for us to grieve now,
So much lost that we will never see again.
And yet so much still arising
That we have only begun to dream.


Can we shed despair
As we shed our tears
And see with clearer eyes
The shining form now emerging?


- Larry Robinson

---

Forget
Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?
A childlike sun grows warm.
A grandson and a great-grandson are born.
You are led by the hand once again.

The names of the rivers remain with you.
How endless those rivers seem!
Your fields lie fallow,
The city towers are not as they were.
You stand at the threshold mute.
- Czeslaw Milosz
(translation by Robert Hass)

Invisible Work


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


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


- Alison Luterman

The Argonaut

I am old and have not prospered.
I possess only my thoughts. I have accumulated only
memories.
And I am mad. Insane.
It is my solace.
One cannot fail at madness.
It is my truth.
It is my freedom.
To whom does a mad man make account?
I am not judged for the quality of my madness.
Like the retarded. I am left alone. To explore.
To discover.
This is the new frontier.
I am the argonaut.


- Richard Manley