Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Judean Date Palm

The dandelion seed needs
only the rumor of rain
to open its doors
and begin to unfold.

Some seeds, like the chaparral,
are only released
by the merciless grace
of fire and smoke.

Some must travel
the labyrinth
of an animal gut
for their casings to soften.

Still others, like the olive or date,
can sleep safely for centuries
until some crushing blow
awakens the mystery within.

I like to think that,
just before those zealots,
sure of their righteousness
and unbent before the legions
gathering on the plains below,
stepped into eternity,
one among them -
a child perhaps -
savored one final taste
of the sweetness of this life.

Two thousand years later
in Kibbutz Ketura
a young palm tree is growing
from the pit of that date
dropped on the heights of Masada
to await its own rebirth.

- Larry Robinson

Love This Miraculous World

Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.

- Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry brings it down to the simplest, understandable and most elegant.
"Reduced to the scale of our competence",
In other words: Think globally, act locally.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Love This Miraculous World
...
- Wendell Berry

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w/Laguna De Santa Rosa

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Posted in reply to the post by Richard Nichols:

Wendell Berry brings it down to the simplest, understandable and most elegant.
"Reduced to the scale of our competence",
In other words: Think globally, act locally.

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High School Senior For seventeen years, her breath in the house at night, puff, puff, like summer cumulus above her bed, and her scalp smelling of apricots — this being who had formed within me, squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night, like an eohippus she had come out of history slowly, through me, into the daylight, I had the daily sight of her, like food or air she was there, like a mother. I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell the difference between her leaving for college and our parting forever — I try to see this apartment without her, without her pure depth of feeling, without her creek-brown hair, her daedal hands with their tapered fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak's wing, but I can't. Seventeen years ago, in this room, she moved inside me, I looked at the river, I could not imagine my life with her. I gazed across the street, And saw, in the icy winter sun, a column of steam rush up away from the earth. There are creatures whose children float away at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for weeks and never see them again. My daughter is free and she is in me — no, my love of her is in me, moving in my heart, changing chambers, like something poured from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed. - Sharon Olds

Dawn
Dawn in New York has

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...9_08-26-44.png

four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
- Federico García Lorca

Gee, I've seen some lovely dawns in New York!
Still, I know what he's getting at. The poem makes its point well, powerful images.
Just saying, there's another side too... :wink:

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Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:

Gee, I've seen some lovely dawns in New York!
Still, I know what he's getting at. The poem makes its point well, powerful images.
Just saying, there's another side too... :wink:

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Hey, everyone! I conducted an interview with Larry for my monthly literary column this past week, "Off the Page," and it's now live online! Check out the link here to learn all about your poem-a-day hero.
https://www.sonomawest.com/discoveri...2381867fc.html
-Michelle

Top image is granddaughter, bottom two are myself circa 1940. Even old excretory gases like myself appreciate poetry.

My Father's Letters

Every day my father writes
His life into being. He plants
Razor wire around the perimeter
Of his mind to keep out
The fog that steals the present,
Mines the paths of his memory.

He composes tiny tasks
To define the boundaries
Of his days and lives
In a country shrunken
By the success of survival.

Routine and ritual hold him
As they always have, as a mother
Holds her child, assures him
Of the moment's permanence,
The presence of only now.

Bound by a body less
And less, he walks
The borders of his dwindling
Spheres and touches the stillness
Of the Unknown to come.

- Rebecca del Rio

I Love Your Crazy Bones

Even your odds and ends.
I love your teeth, crazy bones,
Madcap knees and elbows.
Forearm and backhand
Hair makes you animal.
Rare among things.
The small of your back could pool rain
Into water a main might drink. Perfect,
From the whirlpools your fingers print
On everything you touch
To the moons on the nails of all ten toes
Rising and setting inside your shoes
Wherever you go.

- Barton Sutter

For The Courageous

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You
who replants today despite unwelcoming soil
so tomorrow can be worthy of the roots;
Your children will grow up to be oak trees

You
who cracks lies
until the grass finds enough spine
to break concrete and taste rain
for the first time;
Your children will sing unconquered through hurricanes

You
who names the nameless
and speaks of their suffering
so we never forget the familiarity of their essence;
Your children will be unashamed of their reflection

You
who pushes against the jagged perimeters
thrusting your weight until you can mold freedom
regardless of the danger;
Your children will dance bravely through sorrow

You
who goes barefoot and empty handed
despite the heavy boots and gun you’ve been given
leaving destiny untouched;
Your children will be prophets,
have fate pressed against their eyes

You
who has been brave enough to move through the earthquakes of heart-break
and carry love into ancestry with permanence
Your children will forgive the ghosts that have haunted their nights
and open the door for their departure in the morning

- Alixa (of Climbing Poetree)

Group Of Men At A Meeting Table

In Imitation Of Tu Fu (712-770) As Translated By Carolyn Kizer

They shift down in their seats or sit off-center.
One leans forward.
Another bows over to write notes in his journal.
Like a good boy, that one sits, back-up, like a cadet.
I have no idea how I sit.

One speaks, then another.
I consider how independently each of us dresses.
Nothing beautiful. Nothing gaudy.
Even my own red does not stand out.

Outside, the dark is like a pearl.
The parking lot well-lit. We wander to our cars.
Scattering to get home. Discussions to-be-continued.
A perfume fills the air. Some sweet tree in bloom
smells like it has filled an entire world all day.

- Bruce Moody

Kyrie

Around midnight he took the oxycodone and listened to Arvo Pärt’s “I Am the True Vine” over and over, the snow falling harder now. He switched off the light and sat without dread of the coming hours, quietly singing along; he smoked any number of cigarettes without thinking once about the horrifying consequence; he was legibly told what to say and he wrote with mounting excitement and pleasure, and sent friendly e-mails to everyone, Lord I had such a good time and I don't regret anything — What happened to the prayer that goes like that? - Franz Wright

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE DIED


ELEH EZKERAH - These We Remember


Tis a fearful thing

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To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.


For your life has lived in me;
You laugh once lifted me;
Your word was a gift to me.


To remember this brings painful joy.


Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.

- J u d a h H a l e v i
(1 2 t h C e n t u r y )

Atlantic low

never to come by here again. And I do not know
what it is all about and I do not care
what it is all about, only that the sun comes
and touches me sometimes and touches the stone
and reminds me. There are trees
on the southern slope, their needles shift in the cloud, shift
under the mountain. Always there is cloud
on the mountain. I dream of the sun,
the sun which touches me when the river speaks,
sun which soaks the stone white, dissolves
the cloud, dissolves the mountain,
dissolves me in it. To be dissolved.

- Paul Kingnorth

For our joy take from my palms
a bit of sunlight and a bit of honey,
as Persephone's bees would have us do.

You can't unmoor a boat free floating,
nor hear a shadow whispering in its furs,
nor overcome the fear that burrows into life.

All that is left for us is kisses,
the downy ones like little bees
that perish once they've left the hive.

They rustle in the crystal labyrinth of night,
their home it is the dense forest of Taigetos,
their sustenance is cowslip, mint, and thyme.

Accept then my wild gift of joy,
this simple necklace made from withered bees
that died while turning honey into sunlight.

- Osip Mandelstam
(translated by Marina Romani)

below, a brief summary of the short, tragic life of Osip Mandlestram.
"Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osip_Mandelstam


Accept then my wild gift of joy,
this simple necklace made from withered bees
that died while turning honey into sunlight.

- Osip Mandelstam
(translated by Marina Romani)[/QUOTE]

A Single Secret Word


When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer keys to living things,
When people who about singing or kissing
Know deeper truths than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To the unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
and people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.


- Novalis (1800)
(Translated by Robert Bly)

For Adam

Life is a magic trick --
Appearing suddenly
out of a black top hat.

Newborns stare up, wide-eyed,
at the colored patterns on the
magician's tie.

Each life is stretched, slowly, into adulthood,
like knotted scarves pulled out of a pocket
too small to contain them.

Love pours out of an empty jar like water --
it is emptied, then made full, emptied
once again, then overflows.

And POOF! A sudden finale,
as the magician himself disappears
up the shirtsleeve of God.

- Lion Goodman

Breaking Surface

Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.

You are the only explorer.

- Mark Nepo

This guy is really good. Gets the "catalogue" of what not to be dissuaded by just right, imo.
Printing out. Putting on our fridge.
The ultimate compliment!
Thanks, Larry. Thanks Mark.
(Oops! Almost wrote "Thanks, Larry. Thanks, Moe. Thanks, Curly! :wink: )

You are the only explorer.

A two-fold good list:
what not to allow from others, and
what not to do to others.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Breaking Surface

Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.

You are the only explorer.

- Mark Nepo

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Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong.
You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.
That is where you came from and where you’ll return.
You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love.
Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love.
Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up. Often.
You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And then to rise again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives.
It doesn’t require modifiers
It doesn’t require the condition of perfection.
It only asks that you show up. And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.
It’s enough. It’s plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

Thanks, Larry. I needed this today.

Pretty much every day, but especially this day.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong.
You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.
That is where you came from and where you’ll return.
You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love.
Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love.
Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up. Often.
You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And then to rise again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives.
It doesn’t require modifiers
It doesn’t require the condition of perfection.
It only asks that you show up. And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.
It’s enough. It’s plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

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What the Dust Doesn’t Know

Even this runt, dust-hugging
cactus with nothing to commend
its spiked flesh has a lover

once a year when
the red tent of a calyx,
bursting from its crown of thorns,

is ravished by a bee-like creature,
which wallows in that bristling
pollen cup, then staggers into air

bearing a scrim of dust,
dusting all its other crimson lovers
on the slope, which swell

with purpled fruit, also thorned--
like Jesus on his tree, waiting
for the two Marys to steal past

the dozing Roman guards at midnight
and pluck the tender fruit of his body
from its bed of nails

and consume it,
then pass
the nearly invisible seeds,

which shall rise again
from their fecal tombs. As Life--
barbed and pug ugly

nailed to its crucifix of matter.
But, don’t forget, the nails
are there to nail down

something precious,
however fleetingly
it flowers, it fruits--

something
the dust does not
know, this is what

the lover knows.

- Richard Schiffman

Earth

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

- Derek Walcott

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)


Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be


For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap


And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Respect Your Elders

When you see me sitting quietly,
Like a sack left on the shelf,
Don’t think I need your chattering.
I’m listening to myself.
Hold! Stop! Don’t pity me! Hold!
Stop your sympathy!
Understanding if you’ve got it,
Otherwise I’ll do without it!
...When you see me walking, stumbling,
Don’t study and get it wrong.
‘Cause tired don’t mean lazy
And every goodbye ain’t gone.
I’m the same person I was back then,
A little less hair, a little less chin,
A lot less lungs, much less wind.
But ain’t I lucky I can still breathe in…

- Maya Angelou

Oh Mockingbird!

now that leaves
have obscured the branches
you, too, are hidden
and I am left with only your voice
your continual presence

- Fran Claggett

The Municipal Gallery Revisited


I
Arround me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,
'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'
Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.

III
Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,
Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV
Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;
A great ebullient portrait certainly;
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility?
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.

V
My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, 'My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI
(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII
And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,
'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

- William Butler Yeats

In the Evening

The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

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the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

- Billy Collins

Song Weaver

for Ronnie Gilbert

"Good night, Irene,"
she sang, "Good night, Irene,
I'll see you in my dreams."
& with her pals
belted out other songs
wishing for a hammer
enough to scare a paranoid
government to black-list them.
Fear was not one of her fears -
her sense of outrage at injustice
was too great - & also was her hope.
When she came on stage
there was no doubt who filled it
& her voice was strong for those
who had none. When she was born,
they say, she was put into a red diaper;
perhaps it was that she turned into a flag
to frighten the bulls that shat
upon the tatters of what
they called "our democracy."
She was not to be taken in
by "Freedom Acts" that tainted
not a bit her unfettered laughter;
she was too big for that as was her heart.

So Long, dear friend, it's been good
to know yuh & I know when you get
to that other place you'll teach the angels
some songs worth their singing.

- Rafael Jesús González

Ah, such a large-hearted--and belted out--way to learn about the death of this great lady. Terrific title. (Not sure she'd have been a believer in angels, though.) Janet

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Song Weaver

for Ronnie Gilbert

"Good night, Irene,"
she sang, "Good night, Irene,
I'll see you in my dreams."
& with her pals...

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Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
The morning air is all awash with angels…
- Richard Wilbur
The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.
I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?
Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because
He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,
I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father
Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—
How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee
This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—
And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs
At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.
- Sherman Alexie

Water Shed


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

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

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

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

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

- Larry Robinson

Half-Mexican

Odd to be a half-Mexican, let me put it this way

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I am Mexican + Mexican, then there’s the question of the half
To say Mexican without the half, well it means another thing
One could say only Mexican
Then think of pyramids – obsidian flaw, flame etchings, goddesses with
Flayed visages claw feet & skulls as belts – these are not Mexican
They are existences, that is to say
Slavery, sinew, hearts shredded sacrifices for the continuum
Quarks & galaxies, the cosmic milk that flows into trees
Then darkness
What is the other – yes
It is Mexican too, yet it is formless, it is speckled with particles
European pieces? To say colony or power is incorrect
Better to think of Kant in his tiny room
Shuffling in his black socks seeking out the notion of time
Or Einstein re-working the erroneous equation
Concerning the way light bends – all this has to do with
The half, the half-thing when you are a half-being
Time
Light
How they stalk you & how you beseech them
All this becomes your life-long project, that is
You are Mexican. One half Mexican the other half
Mexican, then the half against itself.

- Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is America's new Poet Laureate

I Want To Write Different Words For You

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I want to write different words for you
To invent a language for you alone
To fit the size of your body
And the size of my love.


I want to travel away from the dictionary
And to leave my lips
I am tired of my mouth
I want a different one
Which can change
Into a cherry tree or a match box,
A mouth from which words can emerge
Like nymphs from the sea,
Like white chicks jumping from the magician’s hat.

- Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998)
(translated by Bassam K. Frangieh
and Clementina R. Brown)

Imaginary Dokusan: Perfume

Crushed lime halves in the sink,

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...3_13-57-25.png

a wood match's sweet-acrid strike...

I keep looking for things with a beauty
that's not incidental, but have found none.
Because of this, the difference between sensuality

and being fully awake in the moment
is often unclear to me, for example

the sun's smell of ripening
even in things still immature—
which of the two pleasure is that?

- Chase Twichell

A Dialogue Of Self And Soul

My Soul, I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

My Self, The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn

My Soul, Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self, Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul, Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

My Self, A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

- William Butler Yeats

A Beauty Blessing


As stillness in stone to silence is wed
May your heart be somewhere a God might dwell.


As a river flows in ideal sequence
May your soul discover time in presence.


As the moon absolves the dark of resistance
May thought-light console your mind with brightness.


As the breath of light awakens colour
May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.


As spring rain softens the earth with surprise
May your winter places be kissed by light.


As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance
May the grace of change bring you elegance.


As clay anchors a tree in light and wind
May your outer life grow from peace within.


As twilight fills night with bright horizons
May beauty await you at home beyond.


- John O'Donohue

What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?

I don’t want to change
my thoughts.
I want to change
the way I think.
I want to think
in images, in stories
spun as threads
arising long and slow
out of culture and
out of the Grandmother Spider
of indigenous mind.


I want to learn

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to live in the old ways,
the ways of spirit.
I want to see
the signs and the
deep, precise wisdom
of the true ones –
ancestors, elders, any and all
trying to inform us that
there is a way -
there is a way
to heal,
there is a way
to see,
there is a way
to change direction,
there is a way
to give the children
what they need
to be safe
to be listening
to be healthy
to be whole.


I, too,
want to be whole
all the way into
death and, yes,
I’ll say it,
beyond death,
beyond it but not beyond
the cycle of being -
the ring, the hoop of
being together.
This is the place where
Love remains, where
Love sustains, where
Love comes
into and through
all things.
Love is spirit
flowing into the life
of the world.
Knowing this
I am left with a question
to pose to myself:
What would an
indigenous grandmother do?


- Maya Spector

The Interview


Who are you when nobody’s looking? When
does your shadow appear? What gives it form?
Will you let us know when you’re triggered?
Will you stay present and engage with us,
if we are? How do you relate to sacrament?

Have you ever made love with the land? Felt
your own body stir with her gentle rhythms,
caressed her eagerly with your hands? Slipped
your nose inside her alert blossoms, sipping
their generous scent?

What are you passionate about? Where does
joy live inside you? Do you laugh with ease?
Can we laugh together? Are you friends with
grief? How well do you know yourself? Are
you willing to do the deep work.?

Who are you in the kitchen? Will we nourish
each other? What can we learn together?
What kind of alchemy can we co-create?
Do you flinch or welcome these probing
questions. Are you quiet on the inside?
Can we be quiet together? Together can
we come home to what’s sacred?


- Constance Miles

Choose Something Like A Star


O star (the fairest one in sight),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJZU8ixx8is

We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud---
It will not do to say of the night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell us something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

- Robert Frost

A series of 7 Frost poems were set to music by Randall Thompson, as some of you likely know, and are known as "Frostiana". In my high school Concert Choir, we sang this one and "The Road Not Taken". There's another tie-in: a few years ago, two poets from my high school in Missouri and I went together to one of Larry's "Oral Tradition" evenings in Sebastapol. We met in San Rafael and rode together the rest of the way. One friend had also been in Concert Choir, and she and I, on the way, sang the beautiful "The Road Not Taken", of which we both still remembered most of the words our parts in the music. If you want to hear that one, just Search on YouTube. Meanwhile, here's this one. Great poems, both. ♥ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJZU8ixx8is

This Morning


Up early
planned to swim half-a-mile
heard I’d promised my black dog
a good hike
OK

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walked out the door in my t-shirt
heard I need a pocket
my binoculars
OK
back in the house
changed shirts
into my car
drove towards the canyon loop
heard Corte Madera Estuary
OK
turned
parked near Basich
hiked down to the water
turned to the right
counter-clockwise loops
heard clockwise
resisted
then
OK
we all know this listening
as if we know how we should live
crossed the Bon Air Bridge
way low tide

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June
new moon
large ripples
in almost no water
waited
until someone surfaced
couldn’t quite see
turned clockwise
up the shoreline path
through binoculars
saw
this far up
way past null zone
whiskered
mud-covered head
of Harbor Seal


not seen here before

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then
further up the clockwise trail
a smaller head
binoculars
River Otter
and on the shore
yards from protection
Clapper Rail
all three gobbling fish
in the low low water
later
from the opposite shore
River Otter cavorting
in small lagoon
we all know this listening
listening.


- Trout Black

Sunday School Lesson in Oakridge, Tennessee

The teaching was so clear.

The golden fish were perfectly koi.

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Not channel cat in dark flat rivers
or darting trout in clear mountain waters.

No. In this man made pond on Black Oak Ridge
surrounded by blooming dogwood trees,
trees full of the Cardinal’s red flash and song
these miracles displayed their perfect beauty.

Silvery yellow white
Dotted gold orange
Angel wing tails
Rolling fat sleekness
In their water ballet.

Koi being perfectly who they are
in front of God and everyone.

I whisper to the koi,
“Namaste, beauties, namaste!”

- Doug von Koss

The River of Bees


In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older


Soon it will be fifteen years


He was old he will have fallen into his eyes


I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live


One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name


Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say


He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass


I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay


He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water


We are the echo of the future


On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live


- W. S. Merwin

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,’how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


- Mary Oliver

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
is how Mary Oliver ends the following poem. How would you answer this "Summer Day" question?

"Who made the grasshopper?" (saltamonte) she asks? How would you answer that question? So many questions, with so many different answers.

A grasshopper recently jumped on me as I was picking boysenberries, a fun summer activity here. I just sat down and looked at her. She stayed a while, moving her "jaws back and forth." Then she did float away, away, away.

It is a good time "to kneel down in the grass" and accept how "blessed" we are.
Saltamonte Shepherd

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,’how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


- Mary Oliver

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