Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears


My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares


Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom


My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppo
And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you'd make wider washbins, anyway
My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,


as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,
Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn't matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.
"You can't do that," one of the women protests,
turning to me, "Tell her she can't do that."
"We wash our feet five times a day,"
my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
"My feet are cleaner than their sink.
Worried about their sink, are they? I
should worry about my feet!"
My grandmother nudges me, "Go on, tell them."


Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,
all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse
For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps
that match her purse, I think in case someone
from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display


I smile at the midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me
No one is fooled, but I


hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.


- Mohja Kahf

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic*; decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
- Louise Erdrich

The Man Watching




I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.


The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.


What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.


When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.


Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Robert Bly

Penelope's Loom


My specialty is waiting.
I sat here at my loom
winding and unwinding
my cloth
by day and by night
for endless years
while the grapes ripened
and fell.


Meanwhile the suitors
pressed my:
some wanted
my possessions,
some my love,
all demanded that I constantly
attend.


Sometimes I got distracted,
engaged in a bit
of dalliance
went too far
once or twice
but regretted it
later.


How could I remember
what had shaped my life
so long ago,
even before I arrived?
It was all now like a shadow
coming into focus now and again,
then disappearing into the
moonlight once more.


The name of what I waited for
was the voyager,
the other part of my spirit/self
gone astray for so long.
The voyager traveled many lands,
had many adventures
to distract,
finally returned
and claimed me,
and I at last was united with
what I had longed for
for so long,
forgotten fragment,
journey's end.


- Dorothy Walters

Thanks, Larry. This has long been one of my favorite poems!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

...

---

What I Learned from Bill P.

Speaking in tongues,
I just want to say
Everything is A okay
and I do mean everything
for all our troubles, real and imagined
are less than the one heart
and thinner than our blood's share of it
Even better,
the troubles we ourselves create
are brittle, flimsy enough to shatter
in a round hug, or in laughter
flashed from Mind's delight
like a comet in the dark
- Cynthia Poten

Penelope

Twenty years gone,
and you walk through the door
as if nothing has changed,
least of all, you.

Home at last, you say,
and you stride past me
to take up your bow
left twenty years unstrung.
Welcome home, I say,
and scrub floors splattered
with the blood and stench
from your surprise party.

All looks well, you say,
ignoring olive trees,
barren and broken by storms
and long years of neglect.
We can start over, I say,
but you flinch at my touch,
muttering nonsense about
magic spells and pigs.

I have stories to tell, you say,
baring your body’s map of scars,
each ridge of proud flesh
a tale of its own.

I miss the absence of you, I say.
I miss the company of my loom
and the routine of day after day
without you.

- Patrice Warrender

Black Stone On A White Stone


I will die in Paris with a rainstorm,
on a day I already remember,
I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.


It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose
these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood,
and, today like never before, I've turned back,
with all of my road, to see myself alone.


César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him,
everyone, even though he does nothing to them,
they gave it to him hard with a club and hard


also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursday days and the humerus bones,
the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .






- César Vallejo
(Translated by Rebecca Seiferle)

Cheerios


One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.


Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
for today, the newspaper announced,
was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.


Already I could hear them whispering
behind my stooped and threadbare back,
Why that dude’s older than Cheerios
the way they used to say


Why that’s as old as the hills,
only the hills are much older than Cheerios
or any American breakfast cereal,
and more noble and enduring are the hills,


I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.


- Billy Collins

Hymn to the Nameless One
Now as the year swings down,
and the darkness encloses
even the smallest bird,
the largest animal,
and we too enter the hour
when everything is falling once more
into the twilight
of not knowing,
what we ask is that
you be with us,
not as a pillar of fire
nor a blaze across
the heavens,
but like water
at rest in a pitcher
which catches the morning light
and is filled
with its own radiance.
- Dorothy Walters

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart


How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.


- Jack Gilbert

Ancient History


Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,
Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;
Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,
He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;
‘He was the grandest of them all—was Cain!
‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire;
‘Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain,
‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’


Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair—
A lover with disaster in his face,
And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.
‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? ...
‘God always hated Cain’ ... He bowed his head—
The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.


- Siegfried Sassoon

CLIMBING THE CHAGRIN RIVER


We enter
the green river,
heron harbor,
mud-basin lined
with snagheaps, where turtles
sun themselves--we push
through the falling
silky weight
striped warm and cold
bounding down
through the black flanks
of wet rocks--we wade
under hemlock
and white pine--climb
stone steps into
the timeless castles
of emerald eddies,
swirls, channels
cold as ice tumbling
out of a white flow--
sheer sheets
flying off rocks,
frivolous and lustrous,
skirting the secret pools--
cradles
full of the yellow hair
of last year’s leaves
where grizzled fish
hang halfway down,
like tarnished swords,
while around them
fingerlings sparkle
and descend,
nails of light
in the loose
racing waters.




- Mary Oliver

Here’s a homely little example concerning ‘regret’ without wishing it otherwise


Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you’re involved in the break-up, and
Let’s say that you determine that driving off into the ricelands due West,
Even though the sun is below the Coast Range, is a good idea.
And so you do, and it is, and you’re soon strolling about on an irrigation road,
Alone except for hundreds of water fowl and their distant calls that do indeed
Stretch to the color that the sky is, which in this bless-my-soul clear day, now
Hums an avocado hue, swear to god, and (of course) this
Reflects in the flooded fields, in places the sky and water light nearly touching, equally bright.
And the moon is up and the birds are on wing.
So let’s say this is happening and you Realize that the person you must
Leave first showed you that we All
Live in one vast heartland of the World. Our native home.


Then, the feeling that you might be having right then,
Might be an example of the regret I was trying to point at earlier.
From science instruction I know it is always good to provide a concrete example.


- Chris Gaffney

.. concerning ‘ennui without wishing it otherwise

I was sitting here at my desk
having a mini meltdown and
cursing the powers that be
mumbling to my desk, to the walls, to the lights,
to my sandwich and the brown paper bag in which it is packed
cringing at the sound of my co-worker cracking her gum

all the while reading stupid emails from stupid people ...

thanks for breaking through the haze
thanks for an email that is not stupid and mostly
thanks for this poem ... it is spot-on.
from my spiritual practice I know it is always good to express gratitude.

gardenmaniac aka Ruth Steiger

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Here’s a homely little example concerning ‘regret’ without wishing it otherwise


Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you’re involved in the break-up, and
Let’s say that you determine that driving off into the ricelands due West,
Even though the sun is below the Coast Range, is a good idea.
And so you do, and it is, and you’re soon strolling about on an irrigation road,
Alone except for hundreds of water fowl and their distant calls that do indeed
Stretch to the color that the sky is, which in this bless-my-soul clear day, now
Hums an avocado hue, swear to god, and (of course) this
Reflects in the flooded fields, in places the sky and water light nearly touching, equally bright.
And the moon is up and the birds are on wing.
So let’s say this is happening and you Realize that the person you must
Leave first showed you that we All
Live in one vast heartland of the World. Our native home.


Then, the feeling that you might be having right then,
Might be an example of the regret I was trying to point at earlier.
From science instruction I know it is always good to provide a concrete example.


- Chris Gaffney

---

christian desert realism
for Donna Seamone

Friends, let us not deceive ourselves about
the place where we find ourselves.
Earth
--the pearl in a blue sky--
is where everyone gets injured trying to survive.
It’s hard to make this world more gentle.

Let’s be honest that in the dazzling beauty of day
too much of life is eat-or-be-eaten,
too much blood is spilled competing for fresh water.
Let us observe that sex is controlled by dominance and shame,
Let us proclaim that the starvation of the poor is not their choice.
Let us watch every year as the wars continue.

May we notice that in our nation
the words of Jesus have been twisted by hypocrites,
so that pagans are seen as enemies, and the military grows fat,
while the rich believe
we have only ourselves to thank for our Kingdoms in Heaven.


There is no heaven outside this planet.
Jesus said god is here on earth
whenever love takes place.
He said god is for the losers and the infected,
people like ourselves.

Having a heart makes all the difference.
It creates rare springtime blooms, pink
and yellow, purple orange and white.

Jesus didn’t claimed to be a Savior, only that
an inner parent had unlocked the gates for him.
He asked, what do you profit if you own millions, but
lose your ability to feel for others?
And then… he was murdered.

Jesus was born in this desert and
he was murdered in this desert.
He did not ascend to the right hand of the father, but died instead
with a cry of abandonment on his lips.
If he rises from the dead, it is only in our hearts.

Yet love is a spring that never dries completely!
Or a weed with roots that are deep, deep.
For love is always with us, only underground.

Here we are, anyway.
Stranded, we put our parched shoulders to the rock over the tomb
without pretending we can roll it very far.
Let us not be bitter every time our causes fail, for fail they will.
Our leaven takes ten thousand years to rise.

- Alan Acacia

For One Day


For one day
Give thanks to life
Your life and the lives of others


See the Big Picture
And how it all fits together


Forgive yourself & others
Recognize we're all doing the best we can with what we got


Be grateful
Even for your troubles
And the bitter medicine they bring


Know that everyone you know
And everyone you don't know
Is a messy but necessary character in your tiny/Vast world


For one day
Awaken to the truth of Love


- Guillermo Ortiz

Advice from La Llorona


Each grief has its unique side.
Choose the one that appeals to you.
Go gently.
Your body needs energy to repair the amputation.
Humor phantom pain.


Your brain cells are soaked with salt;
connections fail unexpectedly and often.
Ask for help.
Accept help.


Read your grief like the daily newspaper:
headlines may have information you need.
Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street.


Don’t feel guilty if you have a good time.
Don’t act as if you haven’t been hit by a Mack Truck.
Do things a little differently
but don’t make a lot of changes.
Revel in contradiction.


Talk to the person who died.
Give her a piece of your mind.


Try to touch someone at least once a day.
Approach grief with determination.
Pretend the finish line doesn’t keep receding.
Lean into the pain.
You can’t outrun it.


- Deborah A. Miranda

The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.


- Yehuda Amichai

Be Suspicious of Yourself


Everything you do has a quality
which comes back to you in some way.


Every action takes a form in the invisible world,
which may be different from how you thought


it would appear. A crime is committed,
and a gallows begins to be built. One does not


look like the other, but they correspond.
Accept the results of what you've done in anger,


or for greed, or to elevate your ego. Don't blame
fate! That dog lies in the kennel


and will not respond to anyone's calling.
Be suspicious of yourself! Inquire


about your hidden motives. It takes courage
to repent, and more courage to change.


But realize this: just as dust grains shine
in sunlight coming through this window,


so there's a light of reality, within which ideas,
hidden hypocrisies, and the qualities


of every action become clear. All you've done
and will do will be seen in the light of that sun.




- Jellaludin Rumi

Gilead

It has seemed to me sometimes

as though the Lord breathes on
this poor gray ember of Creation

and it turns to radiance-

for a moment or a year or the span of a life.
And then it sinks back into itself again,

and to look at it no one would know
it had anything to do with fire, or light.

But the Lord is more constant and
far more extravagant than my words
seem to imply.

Wherever you turn your eyes
the world can shine like transfiguration.

You don’t have to bring a thing to it
except a little willingness to see.

Only, who could have the courage to see it?


- Marilynne Robinson

Once and For All


for Carolyn B.


She sits, hands resting on the table,
A cigarette, bobbing like a ballon
In the grip of an excited child,
On her thinning lips.


"I get tired of starting over every day,"
She tells us.
Not that she's complaining,
A simple statement we all understand.


"Like sometimes I'd like it to be done
Once and for all.
Like I could eat breakfast today and never
Have to do it again."


- Rebecca del Rio

FALLEN LEAVES

after Sandy Hook

Red leaves are mounded in the cold.
Crushed by the stilled flight of them
we leave our bodies for the night sky.

Inside our chests hobby horses rock,
tiny pianos play brief, familiar tunes.
In hand-knit wools, we sit beneath

one star, then another, another … and on.
We wait for the sun. Will it come through
our heavy sighs? Will we be cured of

this expanse — an angel apiece
burning so far out of reach?
- Katherine Hastings

Toward the Winter Solstice

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.


Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.


Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.


And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.


Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.


- Timothy Steele

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
what they flee is what
you move toward. All your senses
sing, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that the One who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, II 1
(tr. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows with a few tweaks by Kim Rosen)

A Christmas Carol


Away in a manger
or a crack house
or under a bridge
or in a bombed-out village
or a refugee camp
or in the mesquite shade close to the border wall
some Mary is giving birth.


Even as you read this
a child is being born.


What if one of these were the promised one,
the beacon of hope,
the seed of a new light
in a dark time?


What if they all were?
What gifts would you bring
if you were wise?


- Larry Robinson

The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Magi and elders are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among all peoples,
To make music in the heart.

- Howard Thurman

All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.

- Rainier Maria Rilke

The Great Matter

Cooking, eating, sleeping,
every deed of everyday life
is nothing else than the Great Matter.
Realize this!
So we extend tender care
with a worshipping heart
even to such beings as beasts and birds--
but not only to beasts,
not only to birds,
but to insects too.
Even to grass, to one blade of grass,
even to dust, to one speck of dust.
Sometimes I bow to the dust....


- Soen Nakagawa

Thank you, Larry, for broadening my horizons
with the words and the thoughts you have shared.
As days grow longer and darkness wanes,
I look forward each day to my dose.