Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Our Hearts Are Broken, Our Spirits Are Strong, Our Faith Is Triumphant


“Knee-bone, knee-bone, knee-bone….”


In the completely black darkness of the night and early morning,

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in the deep recesses of moss-laden oak trees,
ponds and lagoons where our ancestors toiled for generations,
we drop down - our knees to the cold floor -
and we seek understanding,
we seek solace,
we seek a way out of this “no-way”.
Our sobbing voices utter unspoken prayers
as we gather in supplication
to the spirits that have brought us this far by faith.

Our hearts are broken, but we know comfort is there.

Our spirits are strong because we know guidance is there.

Our faith is triumphant because we know our beloved community is here.

“Knee-bone, knee-bone, knee-bone, Oh my Lord.”
- J. Herman Blake
Johns Island, South Carolina
June 18^th, 2015

Summer

time - the bones of my life...
bone soup fulla marrow

how did a computer screen become my window?
devices

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devices

i need flowers to cleanse my retina
flowers and hummingbirds,
hummingbirds and kestrels

i need hills to climb
views to share

i need slumber parties and brunches
a dose of laughter with my gratitude practice
like hemp oil on chicory
it just tastes good

- Claudia L’Amoreaux

I Dream A World


I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!


- Langston Hughes

My mentor Glen Freeman (author of Kryptadia) was a friend of Langston Hughes and I honor them both with the poem you provided and John Cope's recent photo of Mt. Hood.

A HAIKU FOR CHARLESTON


Gun shots fill the place,
A hallowed sanctuary,
Nine souls rise to grace.


- Waights Taylor

June 26, 2015

Rainbow flag goes up
Confederate flag comes down
Still much work to do


- Katherine Hastings

The Supremes


the joy, the sorrow


the sun
rainbow flags
ecstasy


arrows in the heart
all those years
of silence


now
why am I not shouting
why at last the tears



- Fran Claggett

Father Earth


There is a two-million year old man
No one knows.
They cut into his rivers
Peeled wide pieces of hide
From his legs
Left scorch marks
On his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did, he held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands
and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages,
The rolls of gauze,
The unguents, the gut,
The needle, the grafts.
We slowly, carefully turn his body
Face up,
And under him,
His lifelong lover, the old woman,
Is perfect and unmarked
He has laid upon
His two-million year old woman
All this time, protecting her
With his old back, his old scarred back.
And the soil beneath her
Is black with her tears.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

OmiGaia!
How did she do it?
Upending mythological-scale
notions of Home
planet, Gender
relations, Parent
identities, and Religious
icons, invoking new
commitments to Responsible human
lifeways and tender Compassion,
Grounding us in tactile daily tasks,
discharging species-level Grief, and
celebrating Fertility!
in only 26 unhurried, earth-shattering lines.
I'm splayed.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Father Earth...

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I like the "Father Earth" title, and what follows. That title evokes the Sky Mother. Some cultures tends to use the metaphor of the Earth Mother, whereas other cultures speak of the Sky Mother.

A trouble I have with Christianity and some religions is that they are not sufficiently grounded, in my opinion. The deity is seen as too male and far away distant on Mt. Olympus or Mt. Zion. I named my farm after the wounded healer Kokopelli, the hump-backed flute player who walked the Earth connecting people with both his upbeat and his melancholic sounds. The tendency to genderize the Earth and ones deities has its limitations, so I appreciate
Clarissa for reversing the imagery with this poem and ending it with those pregnant "tears."

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Father Earth

There is a two-million year old man
No one knows.
They cut into his rivers
Peeled wide pieces of hide
From his legs
Left scorch marks
On his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did, he held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands
and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages,
The rolls of gauze,
The unguents, the gut,
The needle, the grafts.
We slowly, carefully turn his body
Face up,
And under him,
His lifelong lover, the old woman,
Is perfect and unmarked
He has laid upon
His two-million year old woman
All this time, protecting her
With his old back, his old scarred back.
And the soil beneath her
Is black with her tears.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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Nirvana


At the retreat, Lee wasn't allowed
to speak or read for ten days, just
meditate. It was bliss at first
letting go of the chattering world.
The silence was like living inside
a rose. She felt strong and clean.
Up before dawn to contemplate, and
then the simple meal with others
she didn't know, but, now, with all this
love flowing through her she knew
she must love them too. They were all
part of the same Divine Being,
In a pond of red lotuses,
in a pond of blue lotuses,
in a pond of white lotuses,
is the utter purity of mindfulness
that is indifference, rightly
penetrated by wisdom. As the days
wore on she missed chocolate,
she missed coffee and cigarettes.
She missed the office and its
endless phone calls, she missed
her secretary and her delicious
gossip. Martinis! And her husband
who was chopping his way through
the rain forest in search of
a tiny, yellow frog. Meditation
was great, but ten days of it
would be enough to make one combust.
At lunch she looked around the room:
without speech, without emotion,
her fellow campers were like ghosts,
or maybe more like mental patients
dulled by too much medication and
electro-shock, sad and empty husks
of their former selves. The Teacher
sat by himself eating his bowl of rice.
Lee stood up and began to walk
down the long path to the parking lot.
She wasn't angy. She was excited
and started skipping and singing
at the sight of her getaway car.


- James Tate

Meanwhile, Music


Tree to tree the birds fly to perch and sing
amid the sway and swing of spring's busy wind,
while wars go on, while the sea rises and the ice melts.


In the midst of life narrowing to the onyx box,
the house of Anubis side by side with the house of music,
sun blesses the breakfast table.


All is perishing, and yet they sing, they sing.


- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

The Place Where We Are Right


From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.


The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.


But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow
and a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.


- Yehuda Amichai
(translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

Under the Same Sun


Apart, we say, as a way
to soothe our separate souls,
"We're under the same moon."
Why not the same sun? The sun
whose light, too bright
cannot, will not shelter


or so we suppose. We chose
together, in so many languages,
the moon—softer, sweeter, it
smoothes the shadows. Still the sun
shines in broken Palestine and
Berlin at the same hour.


We shade our eyes, the luxury
of blinders, the refusal
to know what was caused,
In our name, what we allow.
We wait for the moon,
her soft absolution. Under


the same sun, we suffer
our simple losses, our separate
stupors. Our contours,
contrasts drawn sharp, certain,
so straight, we cannot
see how my soul touches,


reaches inside your body.
A soul, silver-sweet
as the moon, a body
radiant as the sun,
the one whose life
we live within and under.


The life we must bear
to know or burn together
in elected ignorance.


- Rebecca del Rio

Poem #108
Downwind, pine and cedar recklessly enter the clouds.
Everywhere stir the multitude and alarm the crowd.
I can't do the tricks of "person" and "environment."
One cup of murky dregs gets me drunk.
- Ikkyu
(translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith)

O, America!

O, America, the blood you are bleeding is oil.

Where is the old red gone
that once infused your flag?
Where is the courage for honesty –
that blue handed out once like a dancer
so generously?

Where is white? Where is the place where color
meant nothing?

O, America, aren’t you ashamed
to place a gun where courage should be?

Aren’t you lost in the insubstantial lies of futures
eaten like vegetables from a dump!

And underneath your skin, are you not still –
like the dove and the wolf
and the spider and the oat –
only human too! And fairly! Fairly!

Spend some heart this way.
Bend with the wind that holds the flag together in the air
for all to see,
not just some.

On this field of promise
make again the palm held out
upon which each of us arrived.

Grant us communion, flag.
Give us a whole.
Give us ourselves together once again
in quality.


Our stars.

- Bruce Moody

What an appropriate poem for today. So much is in decline in this country. Today is a good day to honor the old-fashioned American values and lament that they are not being adequately followed. "Bleeding" oil is indeed accurate. And too many guns. May this poem help wake us up to our calling to "think globally and work locally."

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

O, America!

O, America, the blood you are bleeding is oil...

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The Dugout

They like it here shaded from the sun, drinking Gatorade in the dugout among the solitude of brothers. After one strikes out or misses a ball, angry fathers climb the gated fence that separates spectators from players and curse. All night only the male crickets chirp, nocturnal and cold-blooded. They take on the temperature of their surroundings. They run the top of one wing along the teeth at the bottom of the other. Their wings up and open like acoustical sails, the sound relentless and unending.

- Jill Bialosky

chilling! powerful image, I love the image of the safety of the dugout.

The lines about angry dads also call to mind the Texas mom who tried to arrange the murder of her daughter's cheerleader rival, or whatever it was. I guess a lot of people still need to read Gibran's "Your children are not your children..." God help us all, ♥
​
I feel this is a mighty poem, with a mighty symbol/contrast which has been under everyone on Earth's eyes/nose, etc, since time immemorial, yet until today, I'VE NEVER EVER SEEN THIS THOUGHT EXPRESSED BY ANYONE! So obvious (and powerful), now that we see it.

When was this ever in America? "Where is white? Where is the place where color meant nothing?

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

O, America!

O, America, the blood you are bleeding is oil...

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Posted in reply to the post by Shandi:

When was this ever in America? "Where is white? Where is the place where color meant nothing?

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White is the sum of all colors.

I understand that. What I don't understand is this "where is the place where color meant nothing?" Maybe it means that there is no place? It seemed to be referring to America's past, so that's why I questioned it. Maybe just my interpretation, but what are others? I do appreciate your clarification of the meaning of that phrase. (Not the meaning of white)

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Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

White is the sum of all colors.

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Well, yes and no. If you are talking about sunlight or transmitted light, then white contains all the colors, and darkness (black) is the absence of color. However the colors we see are mostly reflected colors. In this case, black is the sum of all colors, and white is the absence of color.

Patrick Brinton

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Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

White is the sum of all colors.

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Don't Make Lists


Every day a new flower rises
from your body's fresh soil.
Don't go around looking
for fallen petals
in a fairy tale, when you've
got the golden plant
right here, now,
shooting forth in light from your eyes,
your awakening crown.


Don't make lists, or explore ancient accounts.
Forget everything you know
and open.

- Dorothy Walters

End Of The World


When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.


- Robinson Jeffers

1,000 Year Old Poem


In his hand,
a small book of Zen poetry
His strong voice
reading quietly
this one poem
Brings me into
the presence
of Cold Mountain
The Spiritual home
of the Immortals...
I am cleansed by the Spring
that flows from the mouth
of the poet's rock
Amazed by the wonder
of Heaven and Earth's
Mystery !
No longer a body of flesh
I become ONE with the wind
the glorious, pure, elements
of Nature !
for 1,000 years,
how did this poet's
treasured words
remain?

- Mary Barror

This Is What Was Bequeathed Us


This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth, the beloved left
and, leaving,
Left to us.


No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.


No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.


No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.


That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.


- Gregory Orr

Old Man, Old Man


Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?


He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

- David Wagoner

Happiness

Our ancestors in the earth are not
Ashamed of us. The strong smell
Of dirt, the delirious rabbits, the
Clocks are all disappearing. A

Prehistoric gift acquires the smell
Of salt. I grasp onto winter’s tail.
Some water plants are lying around.
Smell & taste, I have had good

Luck in love. The slippery roads,
The capricious numbers on a blazing
Road, meet me at the forest’s edge
Where we can go with our legs

Lopped off, strangers to the clean
Teeth and tongue of outward happiness.


- Noelle Kocot

Per Diem



Spherically wondrous sunbeam

dwelling in the mansion

of the pine of chastity,

today we bought an ice pack

For Mildred’s injured foot.

Luminous shadow

in the plumflower chamber,

Edna quit her job yesterday,

got drunk, stayed drunk,

behaved like a defective monster

collapsing in the mansion

of self-pity. Meanwhile,

the great sea of compassion

rolled in rolled out, rolled in.

And the blue mountain

of itself remains,

and the blind shampooers

never tire of their work.


- James Tate

I Hate Incense

Who can even discuss a master's methods?
Speaking of Dao, talking of Zen, your tongues grow long.
Old Ikkyu abhors your scrambling after marvels.
I make a pinched, sour face, all this incense thrown on the
Buddha.

- Ikkyu
(translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith)

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

- Yahuda Amichai

And What If I Spoke Of Despair?

And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn’t
feel it? Who doesn’t know the way it seizes,
leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh
of our own blood, rushing
through the narrow, personal
channels of grief. It’s beauty
that brings it on, calls it out from the wings
for one more song. Rain
pooled on a fallen oak leaf, reflecting
the pale cloudy sky, dark canopy
of foliage not yet fallen. Or the red moon
in September, so large you have to pull over
at the top of Bayona and stare, like a photo
of a lover in his uniform, not yet gone;
or your own self, as a child,
on that day your family stayed
at the sea, watching the sun drift down,
lazy as a beach ball, and you fell asleep with sand
in the crack of your smooth behind.
That’s when you can’t deny it. Water. Air.
They’re still here, like a mother’s palms,
sweeping hair off our brow, her scent
swirling around us. But now your own
car is pumping poison, delivering its fair
share of destruction. We’ve created a salmon
with the red, white, and blue shining on one side.
Frog genes spliced into tomatoes—as if
the tomato hasn’t been humiliated enough.
I heard a man argue that genetic
engineering was more dangerous
than a nuclear bomb. Should I be thankful
he was alarmed by one threat, or worried
he’d gotten used to the other? Maybe I can’t
offer you any more than you can offer me—
but what if I stopped on the trail, with shreds
of manzanita bark lying in russet scrolls
and yellow bay leaves, little lanterns
in the dim afternoon, and cradled despair
in my arms, the way I held my own babies
after they’d fallen asleep, when there was no
reason to hold them, only
I didn’t want to put them down.

- Ellen Bass

Observer

I watch how other things travel

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to get an idea how I might move.
A cloud sweeps by silently,
gathering other clouds.
A doodlebug curls in his effort to get there.
A horse snorts before stepping forward.
A caterpillar inches across the kitchen floor.
When I carry him outside on a leaf,
I imagine someone doing that to me.
Would I scream?
In the heart of the day
nothing moves.
No one is going anywhere
or coming back.
The blue glass on the table
lets light pass through.
Something shines
but nothing moves.
I watch that too.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

This Is The Time

This is the time for holding still.
It is the space between breaths.
It is before you pick up the pen.
And after the last syllable.
It is the mountain lake unshattered.
It is before thought, that hungry fish,
rises crashing. It is after the ripples
have spent themselves on the silty shore.
It is precious.
Do not invent requirements.
Do not try to remember.
Holding still a while
will not kill you.

- Alice Klein

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love this one, had it on our fridge! :heart:

Actually, holding still a while is more likely to help you cure yourself.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

This Is The Time

This is the time for holding still

...

Holding still a while
will not kill you.

- Alice Klein

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Limitations

Bulldog on a leash, your bald owner defines your universe

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how proud on your morning walk

past the Momofuko Milk Bar

aware of your boundary within leather lengths of constraint

what’s your name?

you bear the gait of a celebrity or even a saint

in the firmament of flesh,

someone like LeBron James, Meryl Streep

or my deceased Grandpa Moishe

who sang socialist hymns and preached baseball stats

and must have walked early morning avenues like you dog,

on the way to the steamy loft

where he sewed garments

twelve hours a day


- Barry Denny

Benedicto

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,

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leading to the most amazing view.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets' towers
into a dark primeval forest
where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps
and down into a desert of red rock,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than
your deepest dreams waits for you--
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

- Edward Abbey

1996, V

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.

- Wendell Berry

Growing Old


In some summers there is so much fruit,
the peasants decide not to reap any more.
Not having reaped you, oh my days,
my nights, have I let the slow flames
of your lovely produce fall into ashes?

My nights, my days, you have borne so much!
All your branches have retained the gesture
of that long labor you are rising from:
my days, my nights. Oh my rustic friends!

I look for what was so good for you.
Oh my lovely, half-dead trees,
could some equal sweetness still
stroke your leaves, open your calyx?

Ah, no more fruit! But one last time
bloom in fruitless blossoming
without planning, without reckoning,
as useless as the powers of millenia.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by A. Poulin)

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibility

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that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?
If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.
If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.
But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.
How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

- Federico Moramarco

On Memorizing A Poem


In the beginning was the Word--
there's creativity involved,
inot just duplicating
a page of print
in your brain.
You can't clip
these unique flowers
of the ages
and stuff them in
some mental vase.
You have to plant them
inside.
First reading scatters
seeds, atoms,
whirling with life,
even ones that
seem inert.
Repetition becomes
a steady hand holding
a watering can.
Imperceptibly, every word
germinates and sprouts.
Tendrils begin to reach out,
join hands, solidify
a clause, link it with the body
of a sentence, until
each word is tropically bonded,
no longer exists alone.
A stanza coheres. The force
flows on, spirit leaps
across a gap to the next stanza,
back to the one before!
Each reading, connections firmer.
New ones arise, flourish
like bougainvillea. Roads appear.
Signs. Turn Left Here.
Paths and gardens of knowing
form in the brain. Flowering vines
perfume the air above the brain!
Finally, a world
lives inside to be invoked,
called forth like genie
from bottle.
Every poem or story
made one’s own
initiates its keeper
into the long line
stretching back
to ancient campfires.
Every teller chants with Homer,
Valmiki, bards whose names
we do not know, carries
the Light in eyes
onward.


- Max Reif

We Raise Our Hands

We raise our hands not in suplication
but desperation, rage, demand,
protest against the bloody hands
of the criminals & the government
impossible to distinguish the ones from the other.
"I am tired of so many scoldings,"
said the prosecutor. Well, be more tired jet,
Mr. Prosecutor for we want
our children, ours of the people
that alive were taken
& live we want them back.
We will go on raising our hands
with the "43" now a motto of the injustice
that we suffer & is no longer tolerable
that we suffer any longer.

Meanwhile the president
visits the U. S. of A. to discuss
security & the economy.
Whose security & economy?
Ask for more weapons for crime
& repression? The security of the rich?
Assuring them profits at our cost?
Surrender the economy to foreign enterprises
of "Free trade"? Do not confuse us
with flags now stained, dirtied with outrage.
Tired are we & we raise out hands
crying like la Llorona for our children
who alive were taken & alive we want them back.

© Rafael Jesús González 2015

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Alzamos las manos

Alzamos las manos no en súplica
sino desesperación, en rábia, en demanda,
en protesta contra las manos sangrientas
de los criminales y del gobierno
imposible distinguir los unos del otro.
"Ya estoy cansado de tantos regaños,"
dijo el procurador. Pues cánsese más,
Sr. Procurador que queremos
a nuestros hijos, nuestros del pueblo
que vivos se los llevaron
y vivos los queremos.
Seguiremos alzando las manos
con el "43" ya un lema de la injusticia
que sufrimos y ya no es tolerable
que suframos más.

Mientras tanto el presidente
visita los EE. UU. para discutir
la seguridad y la economía.
¿Seguridad y economía de quien?
¿Pedir más armas para el crimen
y la represión? ¿Seguridad de los ricos?
¿Asegurarles ganancias a costo nuestro?
¿Entregar la economía a empresas extranjeras
del "libre comercio"? No nos confundan
con banderas ya manchadas, sucias de injuria.
Cansados estamos nosotros y alzamos las manos
clamando como la Llorona por nuestros hijos
que vivos se los llevaron y vivos los queremos.

© Rafael Jesús González 2015

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

Actually, holding still a while is more likely to help you cure yourself

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Right, Roland, that's the point I was trying to get across.

Fireflies

In the dry summer field at nightfall,

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fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.

- Marilyn Kallet

In Cemetery Pere Lachaise

I want to write about the way, in this City
of the Dead, a who's who from
Napoleonic heirs to their victims, the famed
and infamous, the important and
self-important share this crumbling hillside
village, made magnificent by time and weather.

But all I see is rain and a
British ex-pat killing time near the not-yet
occupied tomb of a still-living photographer.
A stranger with all the time a free and aging
man could want and no money, he passes
time in the luxury of this place where
no one is bothered by money and what it
cannot heal anymore. This stranger

without motive guides us in
the labyrinth of stones and crypts, gives
due attention to the known and unknown,
who like us, wander in the cemetery
of life, bumping shoulders
with loss and living.

- Rebecca del Rio

Song


The chimney sweepers

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Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, "Wait till I return,
I've got a date with Love."
And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm --
To keep his date with Love.


- W.H. Auden

A Summer Night
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
- W.H. Auden

Drought


I
Can you spare some water?

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I’m down to rock bottom.


No water for horses.
Can’t even begin to think
about keepin’ the fruit trees alive.
Never been like this before.

Mid-December and the only fires
on my neighbors’ minds
are those that could
scar these hills again.
Crisp clear days
hardwoods aglow
but at night
no fires are needed.

Gardens long ago withered
wells gone dry
high country lakes dead and desolate
drained for the first planting
of winter crops in the valley below.

II
Among the Hopi Indians
when the rain doesn’t fall
each man and woman asks
What did I do wrong?
Did I stumble in the sacred dance?
lay down cornmeal with an evil thought?

Many seasons ago when
no rain had fallen
on the land and the spirit
for so long
I set out on a journey
in search of a rainmaker.
(It must be my fault.
It is because of me
the clouds always pass.)

Rabbis reverends roshis
and then atop the high mesas of Arizona
I ask the Hopi elder Grandfather David
what I can do.
A long night in the kiva
the feet of dancing kachinas
shaking the earth
and he says
Return to your home
Purify your heart
Ask nothing for yourself.

Simple and direct.
An impossible task
a quest for heroes
who left our world long ago
but what else to do?

III
Now years later
so many lives bone dry
dreams crushed by reality
visions incomplete
anger and bitterness seeping in
through the fault lines of the heart
and still no rain.

I search the radio dial
for a hopeful sign
and hear Smokey the Bear
died in a cage in Washington D.C.
He was 25 years old.

Discouraged but undaunted
I consult the Talmud at random
and find: ‘The rain falls from above
but it begins below.’

As always
It comes down to
letting the rain fall.
Dear friends,
please do what you can.

- Steve Sanfield