Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

This will be my last poetry post until August 16. Blessings to you all.
Larry

Fern, Coal, Diamond

The intense pressure of the earth
makes coal out of ferns, diamonds out of coal.
The intense pressure of the earth
is within us, and makes coal
and diamond desires.

For instance, we are a river
flowing and flowing out to sea,
an oak fire flaring and flaring in a night
with no wind, or, protean,
a river, a fire, an oak, a hawk, a wind.

And now, at first light,
I mark the stages of our growth:
mark fern, coal, diamond,
mark a pressure transforming
even broken nails and broken glass into
clear molten light.

- Arthur Sze

Peach


Having endured the annual descent into bleak November
and winter – even a California winter –
with its diminished imagination of the edible,
the monotonous shuffle of apples and tasteless bananas,
I long to hear from those messengers
from the Other World of summer.
*
Asparagus appears first, quickly reserving a space on the grill
for its partner, the fresh salmon (once the price comes down).
*
Later on I’ll thrill to the advent of vine-ripe tomatoes,

especially the black crims that go so well in Greek salad,

and those glorious red peppers.
*
But when July announces mid-summer,
Sweet Jesus, the peaches arrive!
A joyous procession of yellow peaches, white peaches,
miniature peaches, peaches with every kind of exotic name.
*
I admire them, kiss and fondle them,
check them every few hours until they reach that fine line
between ripe and overripe.
*
I like to make a sliced peach, almond butter and cream cheese sandwich, with really dark, French roast coffee, cream, no sugar!
*
Call me silly, call me compulsive, say, “Get a life!”
I call myself peach lover, peach aficionado,
devotee of all things round and pink.
Oh great apparition of the mother-goddess herself!
I prostrate myself to you 108 times.
I have lived another year.

- Barry Spector
*

On the Uncountable Nature of Things

I.

Thus, not the thing held in memory, but this:
The fruit tree with its scars, thin torqued branches;

The high burnished sheen of morning light
Across its trunk; the knuckle-web of ancient knots,


II.

The swift, laboring insistence of insects—
Within, the pulse of slow growth in sap-dark cores,

And the future waiting latent in fragile cells:
The last, terse verses of curled leaves hanging in air—

And the dry, tender arc of the fruitless branch.


III.

Yes: the tree's spine conditioned by uncountable
Days of rain and drought: all fleeting coordinates set

Against a variable sky—recounting faithfully
The thing as it is—transient, provisional, changing

Constantly in latitude—a refugee not unlike
Us in this realm of exacting, but unpredictable, time.


IV.

And only once a branch laden with perfect
Fruit—only once daybreak weighed out perfectly by

The new bronze of figs, not things in memory,
But as they are here: the roar and plough of daylight,

The perfect, wild cacophony of the present—
Each breath measured and distinct in a universe ruled


V.

By particulars—each moment a universe:
As when under night heat, passion sparks—unique,

New in time, and hands, obedient, divine,
As Desire dilates eye—pulse the blue-veined breast,

Touch driving, forging the hungering flesh:
To the far edge of each moment's uncharted edge—


VI.

For the flesh too is earth, desire storm to the marrow—
*Still—the dream of simplicity in the midst of motion:

Recollection demanding a final tallying of accounts,
The mind, loyal clerk, driven each moment to decide—

Even as the tree's wood is split and sweat still graces
The crevices of the body, which moment to weigh in,

For memory's sake, on the mobile scales of becoming.


- Ellen Hinsey

The Cure

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney's translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

A Yom Kippur Conversation

Hello God.
I think it's time for you and me
to have a little chat.
You know, I've prayed
year after year
for forgiveness
and in Your kindness,
You have always loved and forgiven me,
even though I keep making mistakes..

But here, today, while I am quiet -
alone with You
and with my prayers
alone with my heart.
God, I want to hear
Your voice.

Now, Eternal One,
in Your Omnipotence
Tell me the good things
You know about me.
Tell me
about the times my smile
brought smiles to others;
when my words brought love
to another;
The times my "please" and "thank you"
brightened someone's day.

And Holy One,
while You are telling me these good things,
while You have forgiven me,
Dear, Sweet, Loving God.
Teach me to forgive
myself.

- Marylou Shira Hadditt

Blues

Those five or six young guys
lunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint's. I wasn't too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn't Central Park.
I'm coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared
in case one used a knife,
I hung my olive-green, just-bought
sports coat on a fire plug.
I did nothing. They fought
each other, really. Life
gives them a few kicks,
that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloody mug
pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
from cuts and tears,
I crawled four flights upstairs.
Sprawled in the gutter, I
remember a few watchers waved
loudly, and one kid's mother shouting
like "Jackie" or "Terry,"
"now that's enough!"
It's nothing really.
They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me something
about love. If it's so tough,
forget it.

- Derek Walcott

Bread

for Wendell Berry

Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching

somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch

have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding

have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step

the heart of bread
to be sustained by its dark breath
and emerge

to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon

- W. S. Merwin

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

-Robinson Jeffers

The Peace of Wild Things
*
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven -
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.

*******- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A Morning Offering
*
I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.
*
All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.
*
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
*
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
*
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
*
-*John O'Donohue

MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed . It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry .

- Robert Hass

For Strong Women

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing "Boris Godunov."
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn't mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why aren't you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

- Marge Piercy

For the Sake of a Single Poem

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life.
You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime,
and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end,
you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions
(one has emotions early enough) - they are experiences.
For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities,
many people and things, you must understand animals,
must feel how birds fly,
and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods,
to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming;
to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained,
to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up
(it was a joy meant for somebody else);
to childhood illnesses that began so strangely
with so many profound and difficult transformations,
to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea,
to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along overhead and went flying with all the stars,
and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love,
each one different from all the others,
memories of women screaming in labor,
and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again.
But you must also have been beside the dying,
must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises.
And it is not yet enough to have memories.
You must be able to forget them when they are many,
and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.
For the memories themselves are not important.
Only when they have changed into our very blood,
into glance and gesture, and are nameless,
no longer to be distinguished from ourselves -
only then can it happen that in some very rare hour
the first word of a poem arises in their midst
and goes forth from them.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Last Salmon

When the last salmon come home
like Chief Joseph's beaten tribe
gulls will arrive from the dump
as honor must be accorded, and
the sunshine will be dignified
though we love no dead but our own.

From reserved seats on the dike
we will watch them leaping, see
their darkening flanks like old tires
in the water. The river will be at low flow
as decreed by the army engineers. Here
at the rapids the high school band
will cheer, playing the passage
of great fish through the air.

- William A. Roecker

Rebutting Rilke

How can Rilke say that perhaps
at the end of a long life
one might be able to write
10 good lines
he explains this in 34

are they that good or not
do they make a poem
and who decides what is good
or makes a poem

I love Rilke insight sensitivity
at times I feel he is speaking
from a place inside my own heart

when he says notice how birds fly
notice what it’s like to sit next to the dying
hear the woman screaming in labor
I do take note
his wisdom outweighs the arrogance

perhaps I expect too much
I expect Obama to not smoke
I expect the pilot to pay attention when I board the plane
I expect Rilke’s words to ring true

but what of the young child who
writes about ice cream
running down his chin
the how not what of experience
cool texture of the moment
exploring gravity stickiness
a melting wonder
yummyness silliness
so much for a young mind to explore
no less valid than
the vast experience of on octogenarian
who might soon be reducing reality
to the sensation of something dribbling down his chin

one person, no matter how educated or aware
cannot chart the course of another’s interiority
though I suppose I’ve tried to do
just this very thing

language so damn tricky
if only the poem had said “might” instead of “must”
none of this would be scribbled out
in such fervent rebellion

- Sharon Bard

Ten Years In Abundance

And then it is the semi-darkness of Joseph Cornell's decaying wooden window boxes.

And the wheat paste, gatefold, hand-lettered, double-sided, paint pen silk screen in the oil-based machine craft of 300 dots per inch at ten stories.

And the it is the stripe-socked bike messenger screaming at the aerostar, and the newly bruised innocence in the eyes of backseat daughters.

And the afro-peruvian whistle stopping downtempo in the 12-string electric bottle rocket of the High Dials downstairs in an uptown lounge.

And then it is the bait and switch of a bacon-wrapped hot dog with no onions in the flash toned hollow of Doc's Clock.

And the french-pressed, pan seared, rock salt rubbed, checked fried fillet of locally grown yellowtail lomo saltado on sourdough sag paneer with cebollitas on the half shell.

And then it is the velocity of plantain blossoms and stalled exhaust fumes under the heels of a thousand memories of blackened bubble gum.

And the tannic toxicity of pigeon dander in reconstituted rubber rose hips with notes of elderflower seafoam and blood orange oil.

And then it is the litany of distrustful promises made by the sky as it scrapes the hills, and the look of recognition in the faces of so many adopted cousins, stepping from the brass rails and ultraviolet Edwardian split levels, locking deadbolts with haste and checking their phones for the time.

- Max Spector

She says "if only the poem had said “might” instead of “must”"

but above she says "How can Rilke say that perhaps
at the end of a long life
one might be able to write
10 good lines"

So what DOES Rilke say there?

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Rebutting Rilke

How can Rilke say that perhaps
at the end of a long life
one might be able to write
10 good lines
he explains this in 34

are they that good or not
do they make a poem
and who decides what is good
or makes a poem

I love Rilke insight sensitivity
at times I feel he is speaking
from a place inside my own heart

when he says notice how birds fly
notice what it’s like to sit next to the dying
hear the woman screaming in labor
I do take note
his wisdom outweighs the arrogance

perhaps I expect too much
I expect Obama to not smoke
I expect the pilot to pay attention when I board the plane
I expect Rilke’s words to ring true

but what of the young child who
writes about ice cream
running down his chin
the how not what of experience
cool texture of the moment
exploring gravity stickiness
a melting wonder
yummyness silliness
so much for a young mind to explore
no less valid than
the vast experience of on octogenarian
who might soon be reducing reality
to the sensation of something dribbling down his chin

one person, no matter how educated or aware
cannot chart the course of another’s interiority
though I suppose I’ve tried to do
just this very thing

language so damn tricky
if only the poem had said “might” instead of “must”
none of this would be scribbled out
in such fervent rebellion

- Sharon Bard

---

Early August Evening

This time of year the grass
on these gentle uplands
is already dry
except for the green swale
bordered by blackberry and wild rose.

We're picking Gravensteins now
and the redwoods are beginning
to shed last year's needles
though the tomatoes are only
beginning to ripen.

On the savannah below
shadows lengthen
over the green carpet
beneath the valley oaks.
The main channel of the Laguna
carves a green meander lined
with tule and willow.

The fog is rolling in off the ocean
through the Petaluma gap
and circling north around
Sonoma Mountain and Sugar Loaf.

The small family of deer -
mother and two yearlings -
picks its way through cockleburrs
to the water's edge.

The egrets are making their evening commute
back to the pines on HIgh Street
to roost for the night.

I make my way up the swale
through pennyroyal,
ryegrass and spiders
to the source of all this
life-giving moisture:
the air conditioning unit
behind the hospital
condensing the vapor
of ten thousand breaths.

- Larry Robinson

The Silence

Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

"It is golden," while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.

- Wendell Berry

*

To the Light of September

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

- W.S. Merwin

How To Be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

- Wendell Berry

Five Dogs

1

I, the dog they call Spot, was about to sing. Autumn
Had come, the walks were freckled with leaves, and a tarnished
Moonlit emptiness crept over the valley floor.
I wanted to climb the poets' hill before the winter settled in;
I wanted to praise the soul. My neighbor told me
Not to waste my time. Already the frost had deepened
And the north wind, trailing the whip of its own scream,
Pressed against the house. "A dog's sublimity is never news,"
He said, "what's another poet in the end?"
And I stood in the midnight valley, watching the great starfields
Flash and flower in the wished-for reaches of heaven.
That's when I, the dog they call Spot, began to sing.


2

Now that the great dog I worshipped for years
Has become none other than myself, I can look within
And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street
And bark at them as well. I am an eye that sees itself
Look back, a nose that tracks the scent of shadows
As they fall, an ear that picks up sounds
Before they're born. I am the last of the platinum
Retrievers, the end of a gorgeous line.
But there's no comfort being who I am.
I roam around and ponder fate's abolishments
Until my eyes are filled with tears and I say to myself, "Oh Rex,
Forget. Forget. The stars are out. The marble moon slides by."


3

Most of my kind believe that Earth
Is the only planet not covered with hair. So be it,
I say, let tragedy strike, let the story of everything
End today, then let it begin again tomorrow. I no longer care.
I no longer wait in front of the blistered, antique mirror,
Hoping a shape or a self will rise, and step
>From that misted surface and say: You there,
Come with me into the world of light and be whole,
For the love you thought had been dead a thousand years
Is back in town and asking for you. Oh no.
I say, I'm done with my kind. I live alone
On Walnut Lane, and will until the day I die.


4

Before the tremendous dogs are unleashed,
Let's get the little ones inside, let's drag
The big bones onto the lawn and clean The Royal Dog Hotel.
Gypsy, my love, the end of an age has come. Already,
The howls of the great dogs practicing fills the air,
And look at that man on all fours dancing under
The moon's dumbfounded gaze, and look at that woman
Doing the same. The wave of the future has gotten
To them and they have responded with all they have:
A little step forward, a little step back. And they sway,
And their eyes are closed. O heavenly bodies.
O bodies of time. O golden bodies of lasting fire.


5

All winter the weather came up with amazing results:
The streets and walks had turned to glass. The sky
Was a sheet of white. And here was a dog in a phone booth
Calling home. But nothing would ease his tiny heart.
For years the song of his body was all of his calling. Now
It was nothing. Those hymns to desire, songs of bliss
Would never return. The sky's copious indigo,
The yellow dust of sunlight after rain, were gone.
No one was home. The phone kept ringing. The curtains
Of sleep were about to be drawn, and darkness would pass
Into the world. And so, and so . . . goodbye all, goodbye dog.

- Mark Strand

Keeping things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Keeping things Whole

---

Powerful, simple, obvious, and yet such a fresh insight. Thank you for posting that.

Are There Not Still Fireflies?

Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still four-leaf clovers
Is not our land still beautiful
our fields not full of armed enemies
our cities never bombed
by foreign invaders
never occupied
by iron armies
speaking iron tongues
Are not our warriors still valiant
ready to defend us
Are not our senators
still wearing fine togas
Are we not still a great people
in the greatest country in all the world
Is this not still a free country
Are not our fields still ours
our gardens still full of flowers
our ships with full cargoes
Why then do some still fear
the barbarians coming
coming coming
in their huddled masses
(What is that sound that fills the ear
drumming drumming?)
Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these not the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
Are there not still mothers
sisters and brothers
Is there not still a full moon
once a month
Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still stars at night
Can we not still see them
in bowl of night
signaling to us
our manifest destiny?

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti....

Sit Quietly

If you have time to chatter,
Read books
If you have time to read,
Walk into the mountain, desert, and ocean
If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance,
Sit quiety, you Happy Lucky Idiot.

- Nanao Sakaki

Light

In the first morning of the world created,
on the skin of water reflected,
is the spread of a sun,
and the sun, like god, is a power
you cannot see.
Only what it lights on,
only what it touches with warmth,
and yet it always has a shadow at its feet.

Then there is the sea, the sheer weight of it,
but the lightness of its creatures,
some silver as they leap above it,
and those at the bottom
making their own light
in what would of been
night infinite, as if the sea carries no
shadows at its feet.

Then there is the light of the wood decaying
out by the stagnant pond,
where the eyes of the prey nearby,
shine in the dark, betrayed
when the deer stares one last time
to see the hunter still follows
out in the shadow of living trees.

And bodies of men at war, they say,
give off light.
One I knew fished the sea
and told me of the silver fishes falling
from the mouth of the netted one.
As if in the last breath
perhaps we give back all the swallowed,
all the taken in, and it is light, after all,
first and last, we live for, die for.
We fly toward it
like those who return from it say.

But for now, for here, we fly without will
toward it, drink a glass of it,
see it through green leaves.
There, walk toward it.
Lift it, it has no weight.
Carry it, breathe it, cherish it.

You want to know why god is far away
and we are only shadows at his feet?
Tell me, how long does it take a moth
to reach the moon?

- Linda Hogan

Manifesto

I know that dying is how we escape
the rest of our lives. I think that trees
send us a message: do not believe

you are lucky. The skins of apples
and the peeler will marry; it's simply
a question of when. Believe

in mourning and carrion birds.
Look how their fleshy treasures
dissolve in the sun before their very eyes.

To love something
you must have considered what it means
to do without. You must have thought

about it - the coefficient of the body
is another body - but do not forget
that there are people who are willing

to staple your palm to your chest.
Know there are places it isn't wise to go.
Begin again if you must: there are ways

to make up for what you have been before,
the dust in the corners that collects you.
Sympathy is overrated.

Rethink how lack
becomes everyone's master, drives us
into town and spends our money.

Quiet: the trees are napping.
Water meets itself again.
We reach for the days that precede us

and the world keeps us from knowing
too much. The body loves music,
the abandoned road of it;

each day a peel
lengthens in the shadow of blossoms,
fabric weaves itself into light.

Pay attention to the patterns. They repeat -
terraces erode, groves lie fallow -
order is cognate of joy.

- Margot Schilpp

Welcome Morning

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.
All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

- Anne Sexton

A Blessing Of Angels


May the angels in their beauty bless you.
May they turn toward you streams of blessing.
May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
To come alive to the eternal within you,
To all the invitations that quietly surround you.
May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
Into sources of refreshment.
May the Angel of the Imagination enable you
To stand on the true thresholds,
At ease with your ambivalence
And drawn in new directions
Through the glow of your contradictions.
May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
To the unseen suffering around you.
May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
Where your life is domesticated and safe,
Take you to the territories of true otherness
Where all that is awkward in you
Can fall into its own rhythm.
May the Angel of Eros introduce you
To the beauty of your senses
To celebrate your inheritance
As a temple of the holy spirit.
May the Angel of Justice disturb you
To take the side of the poor and the wronged.
May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
In worth and self-respect,
That you may live with the dignity
That presides in your soul.
May the Angel of Death arrive only
When your life is complete
And you have brought every given gift
To the threshold where its infinity can shine.
May all the Angels be your sheltering
And joyful guardians.

— John O’Donohue

Security

Tomorrow will have an island. Before night
I always find it. Then on to the next island.
These places hidden in the day separate
and come forward if you beckon.
But you have to know they are there before they exist.

Some time there will be a tomorrow without any island.
So far, I haven't let that happen, but after
I'm gone others may become faithless and careless.
Before them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,
and without any hope they will stare at the horizon.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:
to be a discoverer you hold close whatever
you find, and after a while you decide
what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,
you turn to the open sea and let go.

* - William Stafford

Songster


Oh sweet loquacious songster
I am your eager ear
riding your streams and trills.

Be my companion
so once your notes have risen
beyond range

into silence broken
only by a breeze
weighing on the leaves,

I will not forget
my pledge made
during your ecstatic bursts.

Sing to me, sing!
So my heart may turn
in twilight's ebb

and through the night
be drawn
along liquid ways

until your dawn song
breaks its banks again.

- Raphael Block

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

- Mary Oliver

The Pinnacle

Both of us understood
what a privilege it was
to be out for a walk
with each other
we could tell from our different
heights that this
kind of thing happened
so rarely that it might
not come round again
for me to be allowed
even before I
had started school
to go out for a walk
with Miss Giles
who had just retired
from being a teacher all her life

she was beautiful
in her camel hair coat
that seemed like the autumn leaves
our walk was her idea
we liked listening to each other
her voice was soft and sure
and we went our favorite way
the first time just in case
it was the only time
even though it might be too far
we went all the way
up the Palisades to the place
we called the pinnacle
with its park at the cliff's edge
overlooking the river
it was already a secret
the pinnacle
as we were walking back
when the time was later
than we had realized
and in fact no one
seemed to know where we had been
even when she told them
no one had heard of the pinnacle

and then where did she go

- W. S. Merwin

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

- Robert E. Hayden

A Place In The Heart

Two soldiers
are preparing to surrender.
Right now they are just hunched down in a bunker,
to get below the fire fight and also because,
curled up, you can depend for a moment
on the plainness of gravel,
the kindness of the dark—
its remote memory of a cave or a mother’s arms.
A trench like this is on the way to some other place
where they might be less alone and afraid,
so they didn’t plan to be here.

They have planned to surrender though.
One of them has a white cloth tied to a stick
gripped tightly in his right hand.
The white flag belongs to the nation
without a name.
It doesn’t have a written history
or plans of any kind
and it’s not represented at the UN.
But he hasn’t raised that blank flag yet.
We know that he’s right handed.
It’s possible that the other hand has in it
something important
like the air-dropped leaflets on how to surrender,
but you don’t usually practice
waving a white flag,
so yes, you would grasp it in your dominant hand.
And a white cloth a couple of feet square
is not something that you just have in your pockets;
you must have brought it with you,
and a thick, strong stick, too,
you can’t find that just lying around in miles of sand.

Unfortunately, despite the provision of the white cloth
despite the effort of finding a stick,
and of hunching over as far as they could,
in a posture as touching
as yours or mine would be,
and despite having no visible wounds,
they are dead.

And the failed magic of cloth, stick, hunching over,
goes on reaching, unfailed, in another dimension,
struggling, struggling to touch.
It shows how intimate you are, my enemy,
and how much like me.
Now that I have seen your death,
I shall have to live for you—
I can’t help but carry you so that you can see,
and smile, and embrace;
I can't help but make for you
a place in my heart.

- John Tarrant

Cave Painting At Font du Gaume

Of course, even his bones
are now dust,
his flowing mane
taken by the wind,
those sturdy hooves
and solid flesh consumed
and reborn in endless forms.

Even so, through two hundred centuries
of darkness and lamplight
he is still running free
across that vast savannah of time.

And the hand that captured,
in a few spare lines
on the limestone wall,
that wild grace,
sending it down through the years -
hand of my ancestor,
hand of our ancestor -
has long since returned
to the formless.

A day will come,
certainly,
when all this
will be gone:
you and I,
the painting,
even the wall,
carved by ages of
drip and flow,
through uplifted memories
of countless tiny beings
who spent their short lives
in that primordial sea.

And yet this beauty -
this grace -
offers itself to us
in this moment,
the only time we have.

- Larry Robinson

Climbing Along the River

Willows never forget how it feels
to be young.

Do you remember where you came from?
Gravel remembers.

Even the upper end of the river
believes in the ocean.

Exactly at midnight
yesterday sighs away.

What I believe is,
all animals have one soul.

Over the land they love
they crisscross forever.

- William Stafford

Wow! That is an amazing poem! M

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Cave Painting At Font du Gaume

Of course, even his bones
are now dust,
his flowing mane
taken by the wind,
those sturdy hooves
and solid flesh consumed
and reborn in endless forms.

Even so, through two hundred centuries
of darkness and lamplight
he is still running free
across that vast savannah of time.

And the hand that captured,
in a few spare lines
on the limestone wall,
that wild grace,
sending it down through the years -
hand of my ancestor,
hand of our ancestor -
has long since returned
to the formless.

A day will come,
certainly,
when all this
will be gone:
you and I,
the painting,
even the wall,
carved by ages of
drip and flow,
through uplifted memories
of countless tiny beings
who spent their short lives
in that primordial sea.

And yet this beauty -
this grace -
offers itself to us
in this moment,
the only time we have.

- Larry Robinson

---

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

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

- Robert Frost

Alone Looking at the Mountain

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.

- Li Po

The Heat of Autumn

The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Harvest Bow

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall--
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser--
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

- Seamus Heaney

Fog Drip

Fog drip, they say,
replenishes the aquifer.
Redwood needles pull
moisture from the mist,
guiding it down to the roots -
and below.

Even in the driest years
these patient old ones
remain ever green.

Some elders are like that.
They find the goodness there is
and draw it down,
sustaining themselves
while feeding the deeper stream.

They don’t demand attention;
they don’t seek profit or approval.
Usually they don’t even know
they are doing this.
Do the redwoods know - or care -
where the water goes?

Francis of Assissi called down grace
by the simple act of gratitude.
The foxes and the sparrows
drank deeply from his fog drip.

- Larry Robinson

El Paletero

His fingers stop ringing the string of small brass bells and he peddles harder and faster as he pulls out of a lazy neighborhood street and onto the avenue of honking horns and screeching tires. Cars speed past this mobile vendor, some a little too close for comfort drawing concerned or vexed glances from harried drivers.

He offers, paletas; frozen fruit bars of coconut, strawberry, tamarind, watermelon. How many can he possibly sell today; enough to feed his family? The back of his shirt is dark with sweat, but one must do what one must to meet his obligations; si no trabajes no comes (if you don’t work, you don’t eat.)

A sparrow who lives this adage pulls a worm from out of a lawn where cats are known to dwell – a risky business indeed. He flies upward into a street tree eyeing the man who peddles the large insulated box on bicycle wheels passing below.

El Paletero relaxes his tempo as he rides onto another neighborhood street and like a maestro he begins working his bells, hoping to lure those with a sweet tooth and a little extra to spend.

The sparrow bounces branch to branch until he is at his nest then places bits of today’s earnings into anxious little beaks as children line up at the curb hopping with excitement clutching coins in their small hands.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila


Workers get a meal and a message
Poet's 'The Bread of Words' an opportunity to bring poetry to unconventional settings


CHRISTOPHER CHUNG/ PD
Armando Garcia-Davila reads his poetry for Gaddis Nursery employees on Thursday, September 24, 2009.

By DAN TAYLOR
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Friday, September 25, 2009 at 4:03 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, September 25, 2009 at 4:03 a.m.
The workers who gathered at noon Thursday in a warehouse at Santa Rosa's Gaddis Nursery probably came for Armando Garcia-Dávila's home-cooked chili verde and refried beans as much as his poetry.

"The food is my bait," Armando Garcia-Dávila, an active Sonoma County poet for the past 12 years, said with a quick grin. "If the poetry's good enough, they'll stay. If not, then it's my own fault."

The event was an experiment, the first in the poet's new "The Bread of Words" program. It's funded by a $500 grant -- enough for gas and the food -- from Arts Sonoma, a program of exhibits and performances running through early October in unconventional venues all over Sonoma County.

People have to work and they have to eat lunch, Garcia-Dávila reasoned, so if they couldn't come to poetry readings, he decided he'd take his poetry to them. It seemed to work.

"Well, I came for the food, and to listen a little bit," said Jesus Romero, who has has worked at the wholesale nursery for three years.

A dozen Gaddis employees, almost half the permanent work force, came to hear readings in both Spanish and English by Garcia-Dávila and Beatriz Lagos, a published poet and novelist who was born in Argentina and settled in Petaluma four decades ago.

Even third-generation nursery owner Bill Gaddis, who gave the program his blessing, stopped by.

"People need something in their lives besides work and taking care of the family," he said.

Garcia-Dávila, reading from one of his two self-published poetry collections, spoke of immigrants and their Americanized children, who wonder if they'll be able to find hamburgers while visiting their grandparents in the old country.

Lagos, who has published seven books of poetry and four novels in Spain and Mexico, related stories of Argentina, and her own discovery of local wine upon her arrival in Sonoma County.

At the end of lunch hour, Garcia-Dávila was enthusiastic about continuing his series, and ready to keep cooking and reading until his money runs out.

"They stayed, they listened and they were attentive," the poet said. "I'm going to do this again next Thursday at the Graton Labor Center."

Monarch and Mulberry

Listen—those two M’s—mulberry tree,
crawling with monarchs,

that birdshit beautiful
mess, staining bare feet and slopping

cars, and under the leave’s web of light all of us
squatting, pushing tiny free toys

finger-deep into the soft, purple loam,
all of us plucking those live yellow petals

wing by wing, all of us ignorant
of the butterfly’s migration to Mexico.

Who knew then they traveled
so far? Who knew there was anywhere

to go, or how years later
there would be so little left—

that tract of land razed flat
and vinyled up in every shade

of beige, every clean drive ending
with a rubbermaid mailbox and a bradford

pear popping its popcorn styrofoam
of blooms? Who can remember the

brambles and the rusted fence, the darkwater
paths of brittle-limbed weed trees,

and the butterflies, who remembers
so many, those milkweed-nursed sunbursts

of the cricketing world now for sale
in double-panes of glass on Bleecker,

a junk table of blue morphos and blue-winged
cicadas, some even shellacked into pendants,

shrinky-dink art debris bought and locked
in a box of gum and plastic beads and a puffed-up

sand dollar rattling its five tiny dove bones,
a bleached legend of goodwill and peace?

Oh, monarch. Not you. You don't remember.
And no wonder we feel this way now, the world

less of a thing to love. For us, we barely remember
that humid summer, the fan oscillating, the kitchen,

always the fly-speck kitchen. We were watching you,
all of you, flit in the mulberry out back, and after, because

we were children, we tracked that crushed fruit across
the linoleum. After that, the sound of hammers and crows

through the open window, then somebody needs to
cut down that goddamn tree. He was the one said that,

and she agreed. And while we were busy not caring
anything our parents said, there you were, all of you,

no more able to steer yourself
than plastic grocery bags or receipts or anything

littered to the wind, but you knew something
we didn’t—exactly where to go.

- Nickole Brown

Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson's
*
*
"Where is your home," the interviewer asked him.
*
Here.
*
"No, no," the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
"when you are where you actually live."
*
Now it was his turn to think, perhaps the translation?
*
- Jane Hirshfield

A Speech To The Garden Club Of America

(With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

- Wendell Berry

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- Jelalludin Rumi

After the Wilderness

May 3, 1863

When Clifford wasn’t back to camp by nine,
I went to look among the fields of dead
before we lost him to a common grave.
But I kept tripping over living men
and had to stop and carry them to help
or carry them until they died,
which happened more than once upon my back.
And I got angry with those men because
they kept me from my search and I was out
still stumbling through the churned-up earth at dawn,
stopping to stare into each corpse’s face,
and all the while I was writing in my head
the letter I would have to send our father,
saying Clifford was lost and I had lost him.

I found him bent above a dying squirrel
while trying to revive the little thing.
A battlefield is full of trash like that —
dead birds and squirrels, bits of uniform.
Its belly racked for air. It couldn’t live.
Cliff knew it couldn’t live without a jaw.
When in relief I called his name, he stared,
jumped back, and hissed at me like a startled cat.
I edged up slowly, murmuring “Clifford, Cliff,”
as you might talk to calm a skittery mare,
and then I helped him kill and bury all
the wounded squirrels he’d gathered from the field.
It seemed a game we might have played as boys.
We didn’t bury them all at once, with lime,
the way they do on burial detail,
but scooped a dozen, tiny, separate graves.
When we were done he fell across the graves
and sobbed as though they’d been his unborn sons.
His chest was large — it covered most of them.
I wiped his tears and stroked his matted hair,
and as I hugged him to my chest I saw
he’d wet his pants. We called it Yankee tea.

- Andrew Hudgins

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen

A Man's A Man for A' That
*
Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an a' that,
Our toils obscure, an a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an a' that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine -
A man's a man for a' that.
For a' that, an a' that.
Their tinsel show, an a' that,
The honest man, tho e'er sae poor,
Is king o men for a' that.

Ye see you birkie ca'd 'a lord,'
What struts, an stares, an a' that?
Tho hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
His ribband, star, an a' that,
The man o independent mind,
He looks an laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an a' that!
But an honest man's aboon his might -
Guid faith, he mauna fa' that!
For a' that, an a' that,
Their dignities, an a' that,
The pith o sense an pride o worth.
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may
[As come it will for a' that],
That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree an a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
It's comin yet for a' that,
That man to man, the world, o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that.

- Robert Burns

*

Harvest

It's autumn in the market--
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They're beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth--

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy--
you can't take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground's so hard the farmers think
it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.

- Louise Gluck

Ripeness

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested --
this sorrow, that great love --
it too will leave on that clean knife.

- Jane Hirshfield

Reading Today's Paper

(a moment)
in and on a paper
still smelling ink
smelling like a dirty sink
mixed with coffee's
aroma I sit
reading the daily paper
now such old news
now so rehashed
around the world
a potpourri of words
until I come
to the obits
words of fame not one defamed
now all a closed book
history ends
none my friend
veterans, housewives,
teachers, farmers,
singers, dancers too
capsulated lives
fashioned and finished
tomorrow more
day after tomorrow more
more till
I stop reading mine.

- Bill McGee

For Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
we dance the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again, we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

- Wendell Berry

Just To Feel Human

A single apple grew on our tree, which
was some kind of miracle because it was a
pear tree. We walked around it scratching
our heads. "You want to eat it?" I asked
my wife. "I'd die first," she replied. We
went back into the house. I stood by the
kitchen window and stared at it. I thought
of Adam and Eve, but I didn't believe in Adam
and Eve. My wife said, "If you don't stop
staring at that stupid apple I'm going to go
out there and eat it." "So go," I said, "but
take your clothes off first, go naked." She
looked at me as if I were insane, and then
she started to undress, and so did I.

- James Tate

Life

life is a garden,
not a road

we enter and exit
through the same gate

wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

- Bokonon

In The House Of White Light

When my grandmother left the house
to live with my aunts, my grandfather,
who spent so much time in the sugar
cane fields, returned daily to the emptiness
of the clapboard house he built
with his own hands, and he sat in the dark
to eat beans he cooked right in the can.
There in the half-light he thought of all he'd lost,
including family, country, land, sometimes
he slept upright on that same chair,
only stirred awake by the restlessness
of his horse. One night during a lightning
storm, my grandfather stripped naked
and walked out into the fields around
the house saying "que me parta un rayo,"
may lightning strike me, and he stood
with his arms out, the hard rain pelted
his face, and then the lightning fell
about him, and he danced and cradled
lightning bolts in his arms, but they
kept falling, these flashes of white light,
and he ran back inside and brought out
an armful of large mason jars my grandmother
used for pickling, and he filled them
with fractal light. Like babies, he carried
the jars inside and set them all about the house,
and the house filled with the immense
blinding light that swallowed everything
including the memories of how each nail
sunk into the wood, the water level rose
in the well, the loss of this country,
the family who refused to accept him now,
that in this perpetual waking, the world
belonged to those who believed in the power
of electricity, those moments zapped
of anguish, isolation, this clean and pure
act of snatching lightning out of heavy air,
plucking lightning like flowers from a hillside.

- Virgil Suárez

Before the Rain

Minutes before the rain begins
I always waken, listening
to the world hold its breath,
as if a phone had rung once in a far
room or a door had creaked
in the darkness.

Perhaps the genes of some forebear
startle in me, some tribal warrior
keeping watch on a crag beside a loch,
miserable in the cold,

though I think it is a woman's waiting
I have come to know,
a Loyalist hiding in the woods,
muffling the coughing of her child
against her linen skirts, her dark head
bent over his, her fear spent
somewhere else in time,

leaving only this waiting,

and I hope she escaped
with her child, and I suppose she did.
If not, I wouldn't be lying here awake,
alive, listening for the rain to begin
so that she can run, the sound
of her footsteps lost, the sight
of them blotted away on the path.

- Lianne Spidel

Reunion

In winter bones
of sleeping trees
black shapes in twilit sky
I feel my destiny
coded in those gnarled fingers
a language
ancient as runes

And the silence
within me
stirs
as one recognizes
kin or friend
and is comforted
with the certainty
of belonging

And that day
in a crowd of people
the giant fern startling me
with our certain kinship
Locked in recognition
we shared
an ancient reunion

I find
my life
inscribed like this
everywhere
in the wild world
when
I am awake
enough
to look

- Kay Crista

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver

All the True Vows

All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.

There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.

By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.

Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,

it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you

and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,

that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.

I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.

Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years

in my own voice,

before it was too late
to turn my face again.

- David Whyte

Snapshot

El Salvador, 2008

A poet in a busload of poets,
I write the name of the town
the tour guide offers: Aguacayo.
Travel books give it brief mention,

alongside Guazapa, the sleeping
volcano we drive up to get here,
past holes in its side guerillas gouged
to shoot from, past a bookshop

guarded by a man with a machine
gun, small shacks of cinderblocks,
shells of buildings grown through
with weeds. “The army never gained

control of it,” the guide grins.
There is the talk of friends, uncles
disappeared, impossible to translate
because in English one disappears,

is not disappeared. This morning
we climbed a pyramid, a heap
of stone and scrub, dedicated
to the Great Flayed One, where

enemies’ skins were worn inside
out after sacrifice. We take turns
snapping photos of each other
at the top, then on to Sochitoto,

where we find a postcard heart,
huge and veined, jutting up
as a church spire. In the park
I shoot a shrine: the tail

of a helicopter brought down
by snipers, its missile fixed
below it, prey in a taloned claw,
always about to, but still not

dropping it over this pristine,
colonial town, where kids giggle
at dogs fucking, locked together
as they strain to come unstuck,

while a thin girl swings a Kermit
the Frog doll. Here in Aguacayo,
no town, no tourists, just a few men
leaning in thresholds and us poets,

scribbling notes. Ivy outside
of what was a church refuses
to root inside, three decades
after a bomb flattened all

who took shelter. Only the floor,
bits of wall, remain, the elevation
of what must have been the altar.
A camera flashes in the ash

of twilight. The men look up
from their card game, the deck
thick with dust. I turn away
to stop them from watching me

watch them, framed by debris,
and look back at my daughter
who tries to walk through the ruins,
but wobbles, plops—not quite grown

enough to balance. She bends
forward, pats the ground
with her palms, taps her dirt-
covered fingers to her tongue.

- Andy Young

After Rain

I drink this delicious morning,
spread my arms wide,
grateful,
my steps slowed,
my ears muffled by mists,
my eyes by falling dew are
drawn up,
to see again
for the first time
these ancient twisted pines
I’ve walked beneath
for twenty years.

From deepest green dew-tipped
needles hangs
a brilliant arachnoid
structure, strung
improbably from one low
branch up to where,
carelessly at risk
to the next strong wind, it speaks
silent
tribute to the
unnameable source
from which it arose, and
to its quiet center
where awaits
the hungry,
hopeful
artist.

- Scott O'Brien

Dream On

Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church
as if that were a natural part of life.
Investing money is second nature to them.
They contribute to political campaigns
that have absolutely no poetry in them
and promise none for the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night
and pretend as though nothing is missing.
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing.
The family dog howls all night,
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life.
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations,
croquet, fox hunts, their sea shores and sunsets,
their cocktails on the balcony, dog races,
and all that kissing and hugging, and don't
forget the good deeds, the charity work,
nursing the baby squirrels all through the night,
filling the birdfeeders all winter,
helping the stranger change her tire.
Still, there's that disagreeable exhalation
from decaying matter, subtle but everpresent.
They walk around erect like champions.
They are smooth-spoken and witty.
When alone, rare occasion, they stare
into the mirror for hours, bewildered.
There was something they meant to say, but didn't:
"And if we put the statue of the rhinoceros
next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times,
learn to yodel, shave our heads, call
our ancestors back from the dead--"
poetrywise it's still a bust, bankrupt.
You haven't scribbled a syllable of it.
You're a nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.
The hereafter may not last all that long.
Radiant childhood sweetheart,
secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow,
fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids:
all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's extravagant labor.
And yet it's cruel to expect too much.
It's a rare species of bird
that refuses to be categorized.
Its song is barely audible.
It is like a dragonfly in a dream--
here, then there, then here again,
low-flying amber-wing darting upward
then out of sight.
And the dream has a pain in its heart
the wonders of which are manifold,
or so the story is told.

- James Tate

Escape

In Palestine, in the days
before anything but God,
the believers prepared two goats.
One was sacrificed.
The second was allowed to run away
as if by accident into the mountains:
the escape-goat,
with everybody's sins on its back.

I can move through your streets feigning
an exact destination
but our eyes never touch. You know me.
I have fled my homeland, hopeful
as a lizard pulling clean from an old skin.

My nation has doors as wide as granaries
to turn the believers out
to run here on dark hooves,
through your cities,
where red cascades of flowers
sigh of the conquest.
Our feet click on your stones
but we've carried off nothing.
The sins
are still back there, staining the altar.

- Barbara Kingsolver

The First Artichoke

Though everyone said no one could grow
artichokes in New Jersey, my father
planted the seeds and they grew one magnificent
artichoke, late-season, long after the squash,
tomatoes, and zucchini.

It was the derelict in my father's garden,
little Buddha of a vegetable, pinecone gone awry.
It was as strange as a bony-plated armadillo.

My mother prepared the artichoke as if preparing
a miracle. She snipped the bronzy winter-kissed tips
mashed breadcrumbs, oregano, parmesan, garlic,
and lemon, stuffed the mush between the leaves,
baked, then placed the artichoke on the table.
This, she said, was food we could eat with our fingers.
The First Artichoke

When I hesitated, my father spoke of beautiful Cynara,
who'd loved her mother more than she'd loved Zeus.
In anger, the god transformed her
into an artichoke. And in 1949 Marilyn Monroe
had been crowned California's first Artichoke Queen.

I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.

Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.

But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.

- Diane Lockward

my dream about the second coming


mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.

when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.

- Lucille Clifton

The Fox and the Smile

a great fox tawny as gold
carried me away
over the jeweled hills of spring
to his hole on the edge of day


he was agile and beautiful as wind
but tears ran down my face
I am not ready yet I said
to come to this lonely place

and then the shining fox was gone
and a presence smiled in the luminous air
and I too smiled at the setting sun
and the night came on, and the night was fair.

- Hester G. Storm

The Well Rising

The well rising without sound,
the spring on a hillside,
the plowshare brimming through deep ground
everywhere in the field—

The sharp swallows in their swerve
flaring and hesitating
hunting for the final curve
coming closer and closer—

The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat
counseling decision, decision:
thunderous examples. I place my feet
with care in such a world.

- William Stafford

For the Traveler

Every time you leave home,
Another road takes you
Into a world you were never in.

New strangers on other paths await.
New places that have never seen you
Will startle a little at your entry.
Old places that know you well
Will pretend nothing
Changed since your last visit.

When you travel, you find yourself
Alone in a different way,
More attentive now
To the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eye watching
You abroad; and how what meets you
Touches that part of the heart
That lies low at home:

How you unexpectedly attune
To the timbre in some voice,
Opening in conversation
You want to take in
To where your longing
Has pressed hard enough
Inward, on some unsaid dark,
To create a crystal of insight
You could not have known
You needed
To illuminate
Your way.

When you travel,
A new silence
Goes with you,
And if you listen,
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:
Make sure, before you go,
To take the time
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life,
And the urgencies
That deserve to claim you.

May you travel in an awakened way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you.

May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,
And live your time away to its fullest;
Return home more enriched, and free
To balance the gift of days which call you.

- John O'Donohue

In Blackwater Woods


Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things;
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it’
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver

The Time Has Come

the time has come
to break all my promises
tear apart all chains
and cast away all advice

disassemble the heavens
link by link
and break at once
all lovers' ties
with the sword of death

put cotton inside
both my ears
and close them to
all words of wisdom

crash the door and
enter the chamber
where all sweet
things are hidden

how long can i
beg and bargain
for the things of this world
while love is waiting

how long before
i can rise beyond
how i am and
what i am

- Jelalludin Rumi
Ghazal 1591
Translated by Nader Khalili

Again, Again!

Again, again, even if we know the countryside of love,
and the tiny churchyard with its names mourning,
and the chasm, more and more silent, terrifying, into which

the others dropped: we walk out together anyway
beneath the ancient trees, we lie down again,
again, among the flowers, and face the sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Let's Go Home

Late and starting to rain, it's time to go home.
We've wandered long enough in empty buildings.
I know it's tempting to stay and meet those new people.
I know it's even more sensible
to spend the night here with them,
but I want to be home.

We've seen enough beautiful places with signs on them
saying "This Is God's House".
That's seeing the grain like the ants do,
without the work of harvesting.
Let's leave grazing to cows and go
where we know what everyone really intends,
where we can walk around without clothes on.

- Rumi
Version by Coleman Barks

The Way of Pain
1.
For parents, the only way
is hard. We who give life
give pain. There is no help.
Yet we who give pain
give love; by pain we learn
the extremity of love.
2.

I read of Abraham's sacrifice
the Voice required of him,
so that he led to the altar
and the knife his only son.
The beloved life was spared
that time, but not the pain.
It was the pain that was required.
3.

I read of Christ crucified,
the only begotten Son
sacrificed to flesh and time
and all our woe. He died
and rose, but who does not tremble
for his pain, his loneliness,
and the darkness of the sixth hour?
Unless we grieve like Mary
at His grave, giving Him up
as lost, no Easter morning comes.
4.
And then I slept, and dreamed
the life of my only son
was required of me, and I
must bring him to the edge
of pain, not knowing why.

I woke, and yet that pain
was true. It brought his life
to the full in me. I bore him
suffering, with love like the sun,
too bright, unsparing, whole.

- Wendell Berry

The Silence of the Stars

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
Half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

- David Wagoner

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver

Summer’s End

At 4:38 a.m. a mockingbird wakes to begin her concert. She prefers the topmost branches of the sycamore tree next door where she’s taken up residence. Throughout the day she entertains with a rapid succession of trills and chirps.

Meanwhile, in the fig tree

a blue jay wipes its beak

against a branch


From April to October the “national pastime” follows the long arc of the growing season. The highs and lows, wins and losses. Now, baseball is reaching its climax with the World Series and it too will soon go dormant.

Game-ending error

shortstop stares into his glove

-- the crowd … stunned silent


This afternoon entire trees are on fire. The liquidambars in the neighborhood proclaim the season with a spectacle of trees aglow in yellow, russet, and crimson.

Falling maple leaf

catches the sun’s failing light

for the last time


It’s time once again for the autumnal ritual of cleaning the gutters—another reminder that the road ahead is shorter than the one I’ve already traveled.

- andrew zarrillo

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

- Czeslaw Milosz
(translated by Anthony Milosz)

Praying For Rain

The rain is here — political as ever —
Whose lack withers nations,
Whose excess, regimes.

You, rain, will turn into buds near the running streams of spring.
You will turn into cows
And into canyons.

You will turn into immortality —
Bays, clouds, drizzle — circling
Everlastingly.

You will turn into my teeth
Chilled by iced-water
Becoming me.

Your drops are the many prayers not said,
An overlooked hoard
Conquering China
And the steep street downtown.

You are The Queen of Taken-For-Granted,
As sparse as sand and as particular.

The boughs of trees open their arms in gladness.

- Bruce Moody

We Have Not Come To Take Prisoners

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
"O please, O please,
Come out and play."

For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light!

- Hafiz

Be Like A Tree

Be like a tree.
Just be.
Storms will come,
The stars and the sun.
The seasons will pass through, while you
host your nest of young birds.

Turn the cold of fall mornings
into gold greetings,
falling jewels.
Feel your sap tending down,
allow it to descend.
It knows
to gather in winter
your roots to rebuild.

Stand barren and bare
through the dark cold of winter
while underground your spark
is kept alive.

Feel the quiet glow
of spring’s first melt
rose cast through the orchard
warmth welcoming tiny buds
from your winter-armored brown.

Nothing to do
through the heat of summer,
but shade your small estate, simply
allow your fruit forth, and share.

Hold your nest.
Hold your ground.
Just be
a tree.

- Scott O'Brien

Still Point

Leaving home
for work
each day

I hear the trees
say “What’s your hurry?”
Rooted, they
don’t understand

how in my world
we have to rush
to keep in step.

I haven’t even time
to stop and tell them
how on weekends, too,
schedules wait
like nets.

It’s only on a sick day
when I have to venture out
to pick up medicine

that I understand the trees,
there in all their fullness
in a world unpatterned

full of moments,
full of spaces,
every space
a choice.

This day
has not
been turned yet
on the lathe

this day
lies open, light
and shadow. Breath
fills the body easily.
I step

into a world
waiting like
a quiet lover.

- Max Reif

Psalm for a Lost Summer

By the rivers of Estes Park, there we sat down, yes, we sighed, when we
remembered Italy.
We pressed our pens against paper, and we sat under the pine trees,
listening to the crows.
For there in Colorado we were captive at a high altitude, required
to write without breath; and if we could not write, our consciences
required us to read, and improve our minds.
How shall we write our poems in this strange land?
If I forget you, Venice, let my right hand forget to wind the fettuccini
around the fork.
If I do not remember balmy Sorrento, let me never taste lemons again;
if I prefer not Capri above my chief joy.
Remember, O Muse, the couple who strolled about Assisi; who said,
How lovely this is, but next year let's vacation at home.
O Citizens of Assisi, do not blame us for the earthquake that destroyed
your basilica; how happy we were, looking at your frescos during a
thunderstorm.
Happy we shall be again, when we dash from this rented cabin, and
drive down from these great stone mountains forever, Amen.

- Maura Stanton

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

- Wendell Berry

5200*

Slapping their way through nature’s bath water,
sea lion and great white in their rear view,
salt water still purging as they advance,
in a mystical mitochondrial alignment,
they come. Frothing in the shallows
facing off with water’s potent wisdom,
vaulting themselves into jagged, uncertain
winter creeks, in upcountry backyards
to set a constellation of eyeballs
into the gravel bed, that finally
dams them in too, and becomes
an altar of reddened flesh,
while the garnet bark of western dogwood
stands witness to the ritual.

They come, undone, and in their slipstream,
the eagle, long since missing from these parts.
The sight of him snags our breath,
those wide wings, the bullet body,
the single focus – the waiting banquet.
The seduction of his winning pose
distracts us from the mass grave,
drenched in new world crimson.
The last golden leaves of willow create
a shroud of calico light, flickering.
They come, undaunted, into our midst,
showing us what is savory and wild
in us, around us, about us – chinook,
swimming up from the beginning of time.

- Penelope La Montagne


*The headlines of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 14, 2002, touting the return of 5200 chinook salmon that passed under the Wohler Bridge in the Russian River, on the way to their breeding grounds upstream. Chinook were thought not to be native to this area because of their prolonged absence, until DNA testing showed that this is indeed home territory for them.

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

- Jane Kenyon

How Could She Not

in memory of Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995

The air glitters. Overfull clouds
slide across the sky. A short shower,
its parallel diagonals visible
against the firs, douses and then
refreshes the crocuses. We knew
it might happen one day this week.
Out the open door, east of us, stand
the mountains of New Hampshire.
There, too, the sun is bright,
and heaped cumuli make their shadowy
ways along the horizon. When we learn
that she dies this morning, we wish
we could think: how could could it not
have been today? In another room,
Kiri Te Kanawa is singing
Mozart's Laudate Dominum
from far in the past, her voice
barely there over the swishing of scythes,
and rattlings of horse-pulled
mowing machine dragging
their cutter bar's little reciprocating
triangles through the timothy.

This morning did she wake
in the dark, almost used up
by her year of pain? By first light
did she glimpse the world
as she had loved it, and see
that if she died now, she would
be leaving him in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did her hold loosen a little?

Having these last days spoken
her whole heart to him, who spoke
his whole heart to her, might she not
have felt that in the silence to come
he would not feel any word
was missing? When her room filled
with daylight, how could she not
have slipped under a spell, with him
next to her, his arms around her, as they
had been, it may then have seemed,
all her life? How could she not
presse her cheek to his cheek,
which presses itself to hers
from now on? How could she not
rise and go, with sunlight at the window,
and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say,
of a single-engine plane in the distance,
coming for her, that no one else hears?

- Galway Kinnell

Mute Millennial


We gape at
the Wall
the mall
tall towers
twin flowers
deserted lots
hot spots
fantasy lovers

Alone, eyes inward
her writhing
belly ripples.
Waves of groans
circle her globe -
feet braced
teeth on edge
gasping furnace red
beads of sweat pouring
contraction after contraction
grip her throat

We goggle at
the war
the pall
heroes
faces
stained spots
neighbors
hoped-for saviors

Alone, eyes inward
her writhing
belly ripples.

- Raphael Block

Somewhere, there is a healing…

At water’s edge
a green glass bottle
smashed on a rock
a small act of war
against all things living.
She collects the shards,
thinking of raccoon –
the tracks nearby –
those soft pads
carrying them down
to wash their food in the dark,
children pushing off
on doughy feet
as they run to the river.
This little mound of rage
puts them all in peril.
She makes a bowl of her hand
and fills it with the glass,
each little bayonet
dormant and dangerous.
She senses the hand that did this,
striking out from a do-not-enter heart,
a shadowy, slivered thing, she imagines.
In her mind’s eye,
she pieces the vessel together,
making a jigsaw heart,
one not so very different
from her own. A drop of blood
forms between her fingers
and disappears
into the thirsty sand.
She cradles her cargo
and back at the house,
over the trash,
she arches her bloodstained palm
and lets a handful of hate
fall away.

- Penelope La Montagne

Love After Love

The day will come when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say,

sit here, eat.



You will love again the stranger who was yourself.



Give wine, give bread.

Give back your heart to itself,

to the stranger who has loved you all your life,

whom you ignored for another,

who knows you by heart.



Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.



Sit. Feast on your life.


- Derek Walcott

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that labor
at night stopped? And the water
wheel of thought,
is it dry, the cups empty,
wheeling, carrying only shadows?

No my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

- Antonio Machado

The Wild Geese

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

- Wendell Berry

What To Remember When Waking

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

- David Whyte

CLEAR MIND WILD HEART: Finding Courage and Clarity through Poetry

WHEN Friday, Nov 20, 6pm – Saturday, Nov 21, 2009, 5pm
WHERE IONS
101 San Antonio Road
Petaluma, CA 94952
PRESENTER(S) David Whyte
SUMMARY This workshop should be a time to engage with the frontier on which we find ourselves at this particular point in our lives, to understand again the very personal nature of our conversation with the future and to strike out boldly for that horizon.

We are also hosting an evening of open mic poetry and conversation that is open to the public, beginning on Saturday, November 21.
DESCRIPTION Click here to find out more about IONS Transformative Learning Workshops.

Throughout the ages, the language of poetry has held a special power to lend us courage, to give us the vision of those who endured and to hazard ourselves boldly in the world we must inhabit. The insights and imagery of poetry can take us beyond any small perimeter we have made for ourselves and call us to look life straight in the eyes. Once we establish ourselves at this conversational frontier, we find ourselves living amidst revelation, the recipients of visible and invisible help we could not previously recognize. Poetry tells us we can not only be found by a greater world, but also enlarge ourselves to become a participating element in that new future.

The task of the poet is to articulate the “it” in our lives, or our society’s lives - whatever “it” happens to be at any given time - and to try and overhear ourselves say something from which we cannot retreat.

Great poetry tells us that the stakes in life are very high and that failure is possible, yet it does not treat living as a burden. Suffering has its place in any human life, and in many ways is inescapable, yet it is also the hallmark of our incarnation, and one of the tasks of poetry is to show us how to walk into the middle of it and make a home, thus emboldening and deepening our generosity to others.
SCHEDULE Friday
6:00 PM Dinner
7:30—9:30 PM Evening Program
Saturday
8:00—9:00 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM—12:15 PM Morning Session
12:30—1:30 PM Lunch
2:00—5:00 PM Afternoon Program
5:00 Departure
Arrival and Departure: Check-in and access to accommodations begins on Friday at 4:00 pm. You are welcome to arrive earlier in the afternoon to enjoy the campus vistas, wildlife, meandering trails, and oak groves before check-in. Guests are requested to be checked out of their rooms on Saturday by 11 am.
PRESENTER(S) BIOS David Whyte is a poet, author and lecturer, who grew up among the hills and valleys of Yorkshire, England. A captivating speaker with a compelling blend of profound poetry and insightful commentary, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development. He holds a degree in Marine Zoology, and is an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School at the University of Oxford.

David Whyte is the author of six volumes of poetry and three books of prose. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwestern United States.
TYPE OF EVENT Weekend Workshop
EVENT CATEGORY IONS Transformative Learning Workshops
IONS CONNECTION Sponsored by IONS
FEES The weekend workshop fee, including meals, is $275 up to one month prior to the workshop date, and $325 thereafter. Overnight lodging for two nights is $70 per night for a shared double room or $95 per night for a single room. Ten continuing education credits are available for most workshops; the CE credit processing fee is $25.
CE CREDITS Ten continuing education credits available.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (101 San Antonio Road, Petaluma, CA 94952-9524), sponsor of this program, certifies that this continuing education workshop meets the criteria for Continuing Education Credit for:

Marriage Family Therapists and Licensed Clinical Social Workers — The California Board of Behavioral Sciences, provider #PCE 3885, (expires December 31, 2010)
National Certified Counselors — The National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) provider #5492 (expires April 30, 2011).
Nurses — The California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN), provider #10318 (expires May 31, 2010).
Social Workers — State of Illinois, Registered Social Worker Continuing Education Sponsor, License No. 159.000435 (expires November 30, 2009)

There is a $25 processing fee to receive Continuing Education Credit.
MORE INFORMATION www.noetic.org…
PLEASE REGISTER Registration is required for this event. Please use the registration link to register.
REGISTRATION www.regonline.com…
PHONE 707-775-3500
EMAIL [email protected]
CONTENT AREAS Art Culture & Consciousness, Wisdom Teachings

Worldling

In a world of souls I set out to find them.
They who first must find each other,
be each other’s fate.
There, on the open road,
I gazed into each traveler’s face.

"Is it you?" I would ask.

"Are you the ones?"

"No, no," they said, or said nothing at all.


How many cottages did I pass,
each with a mother, a father,
a firstborn, newly-swaddled, crying:
or sitting in its little chair,
dipping a far wooden spoon
into a steaming bowl,
its mother singing it a foolish song,
One, one, a lily’s my care…
Through seasons I searched,
through years I can’t remember,
reading the lichens and stones
as if one were marked
with my name, my face, my form.
By night and day I searched,
never sleeping, not wanting to fail,

not wanting to be simply a star.



Finally in a town like any other town,
in a house foursquare and shining,
its door wide open to the moon,
did I find them.
There, at the top of the winding stairs,
asleep in the big bed,
the sheets thrown off, curled
like question marks into each other’s arms.

Past memory, I beheld them,
naked, their bodies without flaw.

"It is I," I whispered,

"I, the nameless one."
And my parents, spent by the dream
of creation, slept on.

- Elizabeth Spires

Who Built The Seven Gates of Thebes?

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy loads of stone?
An Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who raised that city up each time?
In which of Lima’s houses, glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
On the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished
Where did the masons go?
Philip of Spain wept when his fleet went down.
Was there no one else who wept?
Frederick the great won the Seven Years War.
Who won it with him?
A victory on every page.
Who cooked the victory feast?
A great man every ten years.
Who paid the cost?

- Berthold Brecht