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Vegetables Are So Sneaky
They grow huge before our eyes
but we can't see the growing.
We keep inventing them daily,
don’t we, these elaborate edible sculptures?
Presenting themselves to us new,
each morning our imaginings
are more potent than we realize.
How little we comprehend!
Ah, vitamins
(and by extension calories)
aren't real!
They are constructs.
(Even if you can dine on them.)
There is just so much invention.
It is all around.
The mystery is everywhere.
- Judith Stone
A Time to (B)e Very Purpose(ful)
or Why I Will Actively Support President Obama’s Re-election
This has been a season
for the well-dressed to sit in plush red seats, and cheer
the deaths of the sentenced and uninsured […]
For the rich to proclaim themselves virtuous by virtue of their riches.
For the powerful to speak the brave new truth that money is speech […]
There was a time to be born – poor, in the 20s, in the South –
without a birth certificate. This year this may mean you may not vote […]
There is a time for laying words out carefully like a Scrabble player
And a time for releasing one’s voice as from a shook bottle […]
I do not think there is time to dilute our meaning with blood […]
Freedom has still allowed a band on 7th Street
to play “the Saints Go Marching In.”
(A fellow in a fedora borrowed my umbrella to dance along.)
There’s time, it seems, to dance on the courthouse steps
in front of the keystone arch, and three stonewall cops […]
But do you sense a Gulf spill of money erupting?
Do you not feel a shiver in your soft true belly
that a swift fleet of boats is coming to attack [..?]
– Phyllis Meshulam
The Way of Attention
Buddha says that 3 actions determine life
First - Breath
The wise woman conserves her breath
Follows it as the shadow follows the body
She is reserved
Speaks when necessary
Her speaking follows four imperatives
kind - truthful - helpful - necessary
Otherwise, she keeps her own counsel
This is mastery of thought
Two - Impressions
The wise woman observes impressions without judgment or clinging impersonally
The way the sun shines on all living things without favor
She guards the impressions she leaves with others
Showing only those feathers suitable to the occasion
She shows all her feathers to birds of her own kind
Everything in its season
This is mastery of mood
Three- Sensations
The wise woman observes her body
Studies its functions
And tames them as a hunter tames a good dog to follow her lead
Taming the senses she is freed of excess
Practices moderation in all things
No need to indulge in drifting thoughts, mood or the shifting desires of the body
This is mastery of the form
Buddha says that the total sensation of the 3 actions defines death
The wise woman who has mastered tongue, mood and form
Is said to have mastered attention
Over which death has no dominion
She alone is free
- Red Hawk
What Work Is
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.
- Phillip Levine
Fawns of Spring
Spotted fawns
of spring
have lost
their charm.
Turned away
by testy does,
they are left
to wander about
nuzzling
the dry stubble
of harvest
for a taste
of scarcity.
- Patrice Warrender
Halleluiah
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
- Mary Oliver
Dear poetry lovers,
I will be traveling in Bhutan for the next few weeks and unable to send out the daily poems again until October 9. I do apologize for any disappointment this may cause. Many blessings to you all.
Larry
Say I Am You
I am dust particles in sunlight,
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of the grove,
and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in it's branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering
in metal. Both candle,
and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale
lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away. What is,
and what isn't. You who know
Jelaluddin, You the one
in all, say who
I am. Say I
am YOU.
- Jelalludin Rumi
(Translated by Coleman Barks)
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
the stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill–
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
- Charles Simic
Something Taken Away
(for George)
Age diminishes us piece by piece
even as it builds something within, gives
with one hand, shortens our lease
on the body with the other as long as it lives.
To get at George's lung, the oncologist took a rib today.
What the hell, we've got 24, 12 pairs
so i guess it's no big deal you could say.
24-23 more or less, who cares,
but each mortal piece, no matter how small
reminds us that the body is on short-term loan.
We can remember then that this body is not all
there is of us; something much finer can be known
not directly, but as wind is known by the flutter in the trees,
or as unseen love brings a strong man to his knees.
- Red Hawk
I Know Three Things
I know three things:
That which is will be.
That which will be was.
That which was is.
I dreamed I was awake.
The hair on my head grew grey
And the flesh sagged on my bones.
I turned on my side
Tucking into myself like a mother
Curls around her baby
And found another dream.
Yesterday my beehive erupted.
The old queen left with the restless ones,
Those who yearned for
A land just beyond the imagination.
Those who stayed will make a new queen
From the sweet nectar of their bodies.
Sometimes the Ancestors visit me.
They’re always happy to come.
We talk about old things
To see if they matter anymore.
- Nancy Binzen
Wondrous
I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,
travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte
has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief
multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during
which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make
him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m ok.
- Sarah Freligh
Weaving Fire
(For Max and Michaela, September 22, 2012)
How do you weave together
two strands of fire?
One, a blazing flame ofartistry and emotion,
the other a bright flash of beauty and determination.
Equal forces, met.
Equal passion evoked.
This is how you go –
Very slowly and carefully,
one interlacing at a time.
A small compromise,
A gesture of love,
A cultivation of patience,
A deft and tender touch.
Two fires joined must be contained
or damage can occur.
But tended diligently,
each flame distinct,
yet burning entwined,
a brilliant radiance results.
So, let us all hold out our hands
to bless these two,
to offer a bit of water when needed,
a safe patch of earth on which to take refuge,
a gentle fan to foster a flickering flame.
The Navajos say -
“In beauty it’s begun.”
Rumi says -
“Let the beauty you love be what you do.”
The elders say –
“When fire burns down to glowing embers,
its beauty changes and deepens.”
Do not be afraid to go there.
Beauty is at the heart
of this union.
This weaving of light,
crafted carefully over time,
will dazzle the world.
- Maya Spector
BLESSING BHUTAN: a mandala in seven movements
SPINNING
Pelela pass
wooden spindle whirling
sheep wool yak wool
bus wheels rolling rolling
round the chorten
wrap around bowstring
plaid gho
feet stomping dancers
black hats Tshechu twirling
prayer wheels turning round and round
humble hands round and round spinning wheels
water falling
FALLING
water pouring down cliffs canyons
powerful hydro
pungent splats of betel juice
feudal reign falls
reborn baby strapped on mother’s back
sliding sidewise his eyes crusty cracks
CRACKING
sidewalks roads
sides of the roads
overhangs cracking
stacks of straw burning running
skull cracking brains open raptor food
psyche cracking
deities demons delusions spill inside outside
Bhutan cracking open rocks crashing stories erupting
ancient lore stretching over reality canvas
spinning and falling portals flapping
FLAPPING
prayer flags astrological hues 108 blending
bright then fading
fluttering from hills bridges gossamer
spirits wafting among
daphne pulp porous through screens
fingers stack paper on
shutters snapping capture
orange chartreuse rice fields waving
buckwheat amaranth chilis
eagles magpie wings flapping high
blue dot butterfly fluttering low low
BLOWING
bronze horns rumble deep
out of earth little children sing anthems
tourists blow a mound of marijuana buds
suck hard small flame
black plastic smoking sky over
fractal forests
help and thank you
monks chant on and on
hungry ghosts opening throats
each breath a prayer
TAPPING
woodpecker staccato against blue pine
baby monk blesses with wooden phallus
light raps on head
Silther taps on window
hiking poles pony hooves clop to Tiger’s Nest
thanka painter dips brush into orange
onto the god of epilepsy
huge canvas explodes in color
finger holds steads
precision
steady
STILLNESS
target embraces its arrow
dragon tongue
bus stops
white bellied heron lands
dogs silent
just this moment
vast meditation
dead center of the wheel
spokes whirling out in five dimensions
most mysterious
- Sharon Bard
SEVEN BRIEF NOTES ON HARMONY
1.
A bit out of sorts
while driving yesterday,
I began to harmonize aloud
with the solo voice on the CD.
Happy surprise: I suddenly
felt whole!
Can it be so simple to find
one's true place in the Great Chord?
2.
The laughter of children,
the song of a lark,
the roar of a freight train
bringing us what we need,
all part of the Great Symphony,
but so too are newspaper notices of suicides,
the whiz of bullets, the thunder and bite of bombs
and the cry of a rape victim.
We are counterpoint
to people across the globe
who are going to sleep as we wake.
We play a staccato chord
with every being
we pass on the street.
3.
Once in awhile, the Invisible
puts a hand on my shoulder
and reminds me—“You are Music!”
Then she shows me
how to become
a run of notes
as happy as a trout
swimming downstream.
4.
When I pull my harmonica
out of my pocket
and play an old standard,
“I Only Have Eyes for You” or
“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face”,
I feel the notes going out and up,
joining an immortal
melody in the sky.
Having been
a vehicle for this,
I feel more real.
5.
I know I’m surrounded by Mysteries:
the music of the spheres is
Cosmic Law set dancing,
You, Universal Mother,
and Your circles within circles of Light,
interpenetrating down here on Earth.
It is You who compassionately
taps my shoulder
as a reminder.
6.
Once, arriving early at a gathering,
I felt anxious waiting
for the event to start.
Hearing someone ask for a volunteer
to operate an ancient lift
that ferried people up from the lobby,
I jumped at the mindless job.
and the rest of the evening
enjoyed a role as Greeter,
solid part in the Song.
7.
All that any of us seek:
to find our true
and solid part in the Song.
- Max Reif
Seven Parts of Love
1.
A man leaves for work,
gets stuck in traffic and ruminates
on a grudge closing his heart like a trap.
Love is how he laughs it off.
2.
A dog loses his family
and walks 30 miles to find it.
Love is his thirst at mile 20,
a hidden stream near the woods
and the water as he drinks;
stamina and the thing opposing it.
3.
A bird sits on a wire,
its impulse to migrate
wooing its impulse not to.
Love is when the bird decides;
journey, destination
and the strength to make the trip.
4.
A child breaks a leg,
fear turning her mouth dry,
pain invading her like poison.
Love is a nurse’s hand on her
shoulder;
an x-ray and the lightbox behind it.
5.
At three a.m. a man wrestles with
his conscience.
Love is the contest, and the clamminess
of his sheets.
At four he dreams himself down a
bending street to a yellow house,
through a half-open door and into a room.
His father sits upright in a chair and
his mother bends near.
Love is his willingness to be a boy again,
crying, angry at the world
hot food on the table after
and a fire in the fireplace.
6.
A prison rises from a valley floor,
lights making razor wire shine like fake silver.
In a cell a young man burns with remorse
while a thousand miles away a
victim flails in the net of anger.
Love is the prisoner awake at night
craving to fray that net.
7.
Love is lilac and the one who
smells it;
hunger and the ability to wait;
desire and the will to chose it.
- David Beckman
(from “Language Factory of the Mind,” Finishing Line Press, 2011)
Hanging Bhutanese Prayer Flags at Yotongla Pass 3300 meters
The clouds are dropping
down below the mountains.
We are still above, but descending
with them from the higher pass.
The wind has carried these clouds
to make a way for us with prayers
blown from its lapping mouth.
Clouds spilling like a waterfall
moving from the higher places
back to this place, where a Bengal tiger
has killed a cow herder in search
of his bull. We live at the pleasure
of such wild forces, even as we clothe
these mountains and the mountains beyond
and even down to the seas with prayer.
- Judith Stone
Forty Egrets
This morning
cloudy and gray
as I drove the highway
in white shirt and business tie
from my left at ten o'clock high
arose a flock
of forty egrets
from the area I knew
as a rookery in summer
forty egrets
arising as one
heading south, knowing
somehow, today was the day,
and now was the time
lifting as they had
for millennia
some for their first time
and some for their last time
all feeling the same impulse
gathering within them
some irresistible instinct
propelling them up
into something unknown
but so right
and I knew
somehow that instinct is within me
that universal force is me
as it is all of us
and that someday
I will know
today is the day
and now is the time
and I will rise from wherever I am
toward where I know I must go
lifted
and guided
by forty egrets.
- Scott O'Brien
Birds
And when, dear one, you are so weary
you are ready to give up,
think then of the Canada Geese-
the way all day
they shout back at the beating, broken
heart of the world
"I am lonely too.
Keep flying. Keep flying.
I am lonely too."
- Lisa Starr
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
God In The Room Next Door
The deep thunder of your shuffling feet
has kept me awake now for hours!
You and your party angels,
eating apples from Eden,
and drunk on gallons of ambrosia.
The constant singing is driving me mad!
You and your heavenly chorus, and those
long songs all about what a great guy you are!
Songs that crash through every boundary made in a lifetime,
and every wall so carefully built, brick by brick.
Every wall, that is, except the one that separates us now.
You in your room, and I in mine.
The wall I pound on to get you to stop!
Shut the fuck up! And turn the volume down!
I'm trying to sleep, damn it!
I can see now why you don't return my calls.
Never send a text. Reply to my long, lonely letters.
I laugh with bitter tears at tales that god is dead!
Dead drunk is what I would say!
You and your friends...who don't include me.
My fists beat against the rhythm, my voice hoarse.
Are you deaf? That alone must certainly draw your attention!
That muffled arrhythmia. My constant cries.
But, no....
The angels come and go,
the chorus like an ocean's surge.
The walls fall, one by one.
Except for this one.
The one that separates us now.
Turn the damn music down!
It's opening my heart....
- Jon Jackson
Say Yes Quickly
Forget your life. Say "God is Great." Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It's time to pray.
You've carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don't knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, "How are you?"
and no one says "How aren't you?"
Tomorrow you'll see what you've broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there's an artist you don't know about.
He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you're causing terrible damage.
If you've opened your loving to God's love,
you're helping people you don't know
and have never seen.
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you've known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
- Jellaludin Rumi
(Version by Coleman Barks)
When Great Trees Fall
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
- Maya Angelou
after my daughter explained darth vader
is necessary to balance the force
your children
so frail & sturdy & beautiful—
you’d die for them,
do anything to stop tears,
bring sunshine & singing bird flocks
to their smile
torpedo two-headed wart-nosed ogres
sometimes inhabit your body, missiles
of fiendish words & irrational punishments,
limits of barbed wire & twisted slogans
—is spit running from your chin
or toxic sludge
when they came from your parents’ mouths,
mutilated the rise of your head
from neck to clouds,
you knew you would never never never
say be do like that.
when you hear them flying in your own voice
& see the sorrow in your children’s
flinch
one day you understand
you can not can not can not
protect your children from anything
that still hurts you
only when you have redeemed
every error made by parent,
grandparent, invisible ancient forebear,
are your children safe
only when the hateful do their worst
& your smile emerges from radiance,
the bedrock love of your
own unimpeachable
sacred worth
only when you have sent the
bickering slobber-toothed hags
down to the market to try on
pretty dresses & tip generously
only when you have kissed every
warring perfect hero prince
back to the garden
eating delicious flies,
a shy, content & modest toad
only when all your monsters
sit around the lovely mahogany
table in your board room,
discard their many masks &
contribute intelligently to
your vital success
only when you are as safe as that
are your children safe
otherwise they’d better be
gladiator tough & you’d
better have a big bowl of
apologies to hand out
abundantly—
trick or treat
- Sandy Eastoak
I wonder if this was offered in memory of Russell Means. Or perhaps it was for George McGovern. Two great trees falling hours apart....
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
A Ritual To Read To Each Other
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
- William Stafford
Death
It's a shopping mall exit, unseen
until we take a short-cut.
A side-door we have passed a thousand times
becomes a threshold.
Knee-trembling sex is practiced between such doors.
Near the exit, life is sweeter. Creamy babies are furnished
in bare corridors.
Some passage-ways are so big
they go un-policed and unnoticed.
If you pass through them
not a cat will note your death.
Not even the cat-like angel of death
who records every door you should have opened.
A person can disappear, then the Universe
has to put you together again
from the smithereens of minor sins.
Jesus said: I Am The Door.
He meant, I am every door marked 'Do not enter,'
knowing we would go through,
because that's how the Universe expands.
The unknown is an empty shopping cart
and the store is on fire.
Yesterday I went through another wrong door.
I will probably crash through more today.
The chipmunk that lives under my apartment
is digging his own way,
and the hawk in a nearby tree
is its threshold.
- Eric Ashford
Prayer
Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true story of my life:
one note,
low as a bass drum, beaten over and over:
It’s beginning summer,
and the man I love has forgotten my smell
the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter
when he picked me up
and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down,
among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table.
And Jane is dead,
and I want to go where she went,
where my brother went,
and whoever it is that whispered to me
when I was a child in my father’s bed is come back now:
and I can’t stop hearing:
This is the way it is,
the way it always was and will be --
beaten over and over -- panicking on street corners,
or crouched in the back of taxicabs,
afraid I’ll cry out in jammed traffic, and no one will know me or
know where to bring me.
There is, I almost remember,
another story:
It runs alongside this one like a brook beside a train.
The sparrows know it; the grass rises with it.
The wind moves through the highest tree branches without
seeming to hurt them.
Tell me.
Who was I when I used to call your name?
- Marie Howe
The Ice Melt
The ice melt leaves the walrus
homeless and thousands
climb out of the sea
onto Arctic beaches.
If only the heart could stay open
and warm, the earth's great ice
would gather itself every winter
as it has for eons. If only
each of us carried our
own dark stones, held them close,
called them by name and blamed
no one, we could set our burdens
down together to sing
prayers and praises
for the sea ice and the walrus,
for the caribou calving, for the
sheltering trees and the red squirrels
in the morning, and the world would spin
its seasons, wealthy with its own
ever-becoming.
- Elizabeth Herron
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
- Mary Oliver
Fires in California
Smoke of a dozen fires
drives us into inland caves
whose walls depict bison
mating with two-headed snakes
like stick-figure firefighters
trailing hoses.
Claustrophobic, reticent,
we revert to pagan prayers
and whispered pleas
for cool and rain
as coastal redwoods go up
like Roman candles.
Where firefighter faces heat,
fire, with crackling and hiss,
curses its bad luck
and like a beaten gladiator
stands one last time to
twirl above its head
a net of flames.
Finally comes blue sky
and we leave cover
to breathe freely again
and, being evolved bipeds in search
of meat, climb smartly
into cars and turn ignition keys
so that sparks ignite compressed
mixtures of gasoline and air and we
drive at speeds equaled by racing camels
or hunting cheetahs to Whole Foods,
powered, in our 6 cylinders,
by a thousand small fires.
- David Beckman
Return
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, can hardly fly.
Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain,
Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.
- Robinson Jeffers