Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

powerful poem! Thank you!
brings this to mind (allied in spirit)

And the breath of God, through the Masters and saints,
brought the rains and the sun in due season.
And when floods came or drought,
they did not huddle in fear or curse the sky,
but looked into their hearts to find the sin
and adjusted their sacrifice to the laws of Nature and God.
(Francis Brabazon, STAY WITH GOD, p. 125)

Sympathy


I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!


I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!


I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!


- Paul Lawrence Dunbar

On Grief


When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.


Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.


There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.


It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.


Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.


- John O'Donohue

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe


Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I'”),
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?


- Elizabeth Alexander

Post time


What my father loved about the track —

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time compressed into three-minute segments,
the idea of someone losing his shirt
or a few bucks, or winning big …

He loved the last-minute window,
gamblers tense to place the last winning bet,
and all the losing tickets he stepped on
walking to the boy who ran to get his car.

Once, at ten, sleepless, I carried to his room
some nameless fear I wanted him to soothe.
He told me his secret: to lie on one side
and concentrate to keep away the dread.

I used to think only of my father’s anger.
Now I think of his loneliness.
- Robin Becker

Enough of This
Enough of this—names, titles, roles—
all the bits and pieces
that shored up this self
now crumbling beyond repair.
Let them go.
Watch the memories
and moments
spill like beads
from a broken string
too worn to knot again or replace.
One thing after another,
once piled up like a barricade
against who knows what.
Books, concepts, causes,
travels or acquired tastes—
all futile fumblings
for something to hold on to,
each a willful distraction
from what is happening now.
What matters in this moment?
Not these words but
the wind whistling,
the empty sky, the smell
and touch of grass,
and the clear taste
of water from this glass.

- Newton Smith

I enjoy the images and appreciate the sentiment expressed
However, what if...

that empty sky now burns,
the grass crunches below our feet
and the clear taste of water is befouled?

Perhaps those causes we fight for are not just futile fumblings or willful distractions...

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Enough of This
Enough of this—names, titles, roles—
all the bits and pieces
that shored up this self
now crumbling beyond repair.
Let them go.
Watch the memories
and moments
spill like beads
from a broken string
too worn to knot again or replace.
One thing after another,
once piled up like a barricade
against who knows what.
Books, concepts, causes,
travels or acquired tastes—
all futile fumblings
for something to hold on to,
each a willful distraction
from what is happening now.
What matters in this moment?
Not these words but
the wind whistling,
the empty sky, the smell
and touch of grass,
and the clear taste
of water from this glass.

- Newton Smith

---

wow, love this esp!:

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Let them go.
Watch the memories
and moments
spill like beads
from a broken string
too worn to knot again or replace.
One thing after another,
once piled up like a barricade
against who knows what.
Books, concepts, causes,
travels or acquired tastes—
all futile fumblings
for something to hold on to,
each a willful distraction


- Newton Smith

---

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light!

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In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;
Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?
- Mitsuyoshi Toge


Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).

Hiroshima

How vast the seas of destruction,
the horror!
How ever could our countries speak again?
How could there be another spring?
The depth of such pain,
The unimaginable resilience
of this world!

Is there within us the
same?

- Scott O'Brien

beautiful! man, did you grab me with this!


Is there within us the
same?

Ode To Gaiety

Go gloom
Begone glum and grim
Off with the drab drear and grumble
It's time
its pastime
to come undone and come out laughing
time to wrap killjoys in wet blankets
and feed them to the sourpusses

Come frisky pals
Come forth wily wags
Loosen your screws and get off your rocker
Untie the strait lacer
Tie up the smarty pants
Tickle the crosspatch with josh and guffaw
Share quips and pranks with every victim
of grouch pomposity or blah

Woe to the bozo who says No to
tee hee ho ho and ha ha
Boo to the cleancut klutz who
wipes the smile off his face
Without gaiety
freedom is a chastity belt
Without gaiety
life is a wooden kimono

Come cheerful chums
Cut up and carry on
Crack your pots and split your sides
Boggle the bellyacher
Convulse the worrywart
Pratfall the prissy poos and the fuddy duds
Take drollery to heart or end up a deadhead
at the guillotine of the mindless

Be wise and go merry round
whatever you cherish
what you love to enjoy what you live to exert
And when the high spirits
call your number up
count on merriment all the way to the countdown
Long live hilarity euphoria and flumadiddle
Long live gaiety
for all the laity

- James Broughton

The Word That Is a Prayer


One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he's saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don't go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.


- Ellery Akers

Blackberries

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It must be August.
Brambles have taken over the roads,
have conquered the verges
and now invade the rest.
The long fingernails of blackberry canes
run down the blackboard of my car.
"Sweeeeeeeet!" they shriek,
"Sweet, sweeeeeet,"
until I am driven mad with lust,
abandon the vehicle,
heedless of clothing or skin
and plunge into Sleeping Beauty's barrier,
a briar hoard of juice.

Drunk with sugar,
rival to hornets and wasps
I bumble from berry to berry,
wade in, then back out
against an ebb tide of claws.
Stigmata bloom: my blood or the plant's?
Perhaps a blend of both.
Later, at home, consuming crumble or tart,
I wonder at fine red road maps
etched on forearms and shins;
sweetness purchased at a price
I did not know
I was paying at the time.

It must be August.
Endings and beginnings
stand back to back.
Harvest's gloss eclipses
winter's pending loss,
and tangled caverns of seasons past
buttress this moment's bounty;
when Then and Yet-to-Be mingle--
dead cane and subtle seed--
and haunt the sweet sharp syrup
of this summer's day seduction.

- Jane L. Mickelson

Green Apples


In August we carried the old horsehair mattress

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To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,


Here, now.


- Ruth Stone

Starfish


This is what life does. It lets you walk up to

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the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?


Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.


And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.


Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.


So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.


- Eleanor Lerman

Ancestors & Angels

I write words to catch up to the ancestors
An angel told me the only way
to walk through fire
without getting burned
is to become fire.
Some days angels whisper
In my ear as I walk
Down the street and I fall in love
With every person I meet,
And I think, maybe this
Could be a bliss
Like when Dante met
Beatrice.
Other days all I see
is my collusion
with illusion.
Ghosts of projection
masquerading
as the radiant angel
of love.
You know I feel like
the ancestors
brought us together.
I feel like the ancestors
Brought us here and they
Expect great things.
They
expect us to say what
we think and
live how
we feel and follow the hard paths
that bring us near joy.
They expect us
to nurture
all the children.

I write poems to welcome angels
and conjure ancestors.
I pray to the angels of politics
and love.
I pray for justice sake
not to be relieved of my frustrations,
at the same time burning sage
and asking for patience.
I march with the people
to the border
between nations
where
everything stops
except
the greed of corporations.

Thoughts like comets
calculating the complexity
of the complicity.

There is so much noise in the oceans
the whales can’t hear each other.
We’re making them crazy,
driving dolphins insane.
What kind of ancestors
are we?

Thoughts like comets
leaving craters
in the landscape of my consciousness.

I pray to the ancestors and angels.

Meet me in the garden.
Meet me where spirit walks softly
in the cool of the evening.
Meet me in the garden
under the wings of the bird
of many colors.
Meet me
in the garden
of your longing.

Every breath
is a pilgrimage.

Every
breath
is a pilgrimage
to you.

I pray
to be
a conduit.

An angel told me:

The only way
to walk through fire—

become fire.
- Drew Dellinger

Hate to take lines out of context, but these few are sooo great:

Sara

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Ancestors & Angels

...
I march with the people
to the border
between nations
where
everything stops
except
the greed of corporations.
...
- Drew Dellinger

---

takes me there! thanks for the wings! \♥/

In Search of the Very First Seed


It is time to tend the garden again.
It is wise not to wait too long.
I have learned my lesson,
But it wasn’t easy!
For I have been bloodied clearing the bramble of neglect.

Sometimes I think I know what I am doing
and the garden laughs, “Ha you silly soul!”
I was lulled by the pause of darkness,
I grew fat and lost my way
But the garden is still there...waiting.

It is time to tend the garden again.
Its a dirty, filthy...lovely job.
I’d get help but everyone has their own garden to tend.
I thought my garden was a mess, then I saw others
and had to reconsider.

It is time to tend the garden again.
I am in search of the very first seed -
I think it came from the vapor like everything else.
I wonder - is LIFE a specialty of condensation?
I think my garden will teach me.

- Jeff Rooney

Pride


If I claim I was a terrible, horrible,
Evil no-good person,
It would be a lie, and it would be
Wanting always to be the best or the worst.
So now I’m destined to wander,
My bag full of pride a lot lighter,
And if I say I am done
With whatever ails me,
That would also be a lie.
I am not done, will never be done
Till the day I die,
But I am content to be human,
Naked and shaking with love
At the moment, and the next moment,
I just can’t say.


- Noelle Kocot

Peach

Having endured the annual descent into bleak November

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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

The Moment

And not once, but many times over, again and again, how we disappeared into that deep well of darkness, shuddering beneath that load of silence, clinging to our narrow ledge. Yet the darkness, sometimes, unfolded as light. Our atoms dissolved in it, each separate molecule opening into a radiant disk of feeling. How still we became, witness and thing seen, spectacle and observer, each point admitting an untrammeled flood.

- Dorothy Walters

The Second Music


Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other
lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.
When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it
touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.
I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,
the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,
becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.
I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.


- Annie Lighthart

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum.
Feet began to come - a part of the music. Here comes a horse,
clippety clop, away.

My mother said, "Don't run -
the army is after someone
other than us. If you stay
you'll learn our enemy."

Then he came, the speaker. He stood
in the square. He told us who
to hate. I watched my mother's face,
its quiet. "That's him," she said.

- William Stafford

To The Reader: If You Asked Me

I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if—
who? Who did you imagine?
Surely we’re not here alone, you and I.

I’ve been wandering
where the cold tracks of language
collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.
Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold
of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.

If you asked me what words
a voice like this one says in parting,
I’d say, I’m sweeping an empty factory
toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.
I’m just a broom, sweeping.

- Chase Twichell

Three Seasons

In the early seventies
Greg and I moved back to the land.
Here, no National Guard, no protests
on the steps of Bank of America,
no hash to smuggle into Isla Vista.
We watched leaves turn copper and vermilion
while rutting elk bellowed through air so still
even the aspen refused to quiver.
The radio played country western.
The local paper came twice a month.
Outside, winter drifts swallowed
fence posts. Inside, I couldn’t feed
the smoke-stained fireplace enough
to warm the house and didn’t think
about the rifle tucked behind
his Gibson guitar in the bedroom closet.
Nights shortened, river ice shattered,
and every morning another newborn calf
shimmered among rangy herds
grazing in spring melt.
With pickax and shovel, Greg
tilled thawing dirt for our garden
but never opened the packet of seeds.
When he told me he wanted to leave this place,
I thought he meant our home.
It didn’t occur to me to hide the bullets.


- Teetle Clawson

Point Reyes


Sandpipers at the margin
in the moon -
Bright fan of the flat creek
On dark sea sand,
rock boom beyond:
The work of centuries and wars,
a car,
Is parked a mile above
where the dirt road ends.
In naked gritty sand,
Eye-stinging salty driftwood campfire
smoke, out far.
It all begins again.
Sandpipers chasing the shiny surf
in the moon light -
By a fire at the beach.


- Gary Snyder

So Many Gifts


There are so many gifts
Still unopened from your birthday,
There are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to you by God.

The Beloved does not mind repeating,
"Everything I have is also yours."

Please forgive Hafiz and the Friend
If we break into a sweet laughter
When your heart complains of being thirsty
When ages ago
Every cell in your soul
Capsized forever
Into this infinite golden sea.

Indeed,
A lover's pain is like holding one's breath
Too long
In the middle of a vital performance,

In the middle of one of Creation's favorite
Songs.

Indeed, a lover's pain is this sleeping,
This sleeping,
When God just rolled over and gave you
Such a big good-morning kiss!

There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday.

O, there are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to your life
From God.

- Hafiz

Quartz Clock

The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
The ideas of poems turn into only themselves,
as the hands of the clock do,
or the face of a person.
It changes, but only more into the person.


- Jane Hirshfield

Inquiry


Is it wrong to be so in love with coffee?
Is it wrong to add a shot of Irish Cream?
Is it wrong to not return the drug store lip gloss
that was already opened when I
handed it to the checkout lady?
I really didn’t see….
Its slick pyramid smells
of sickly sweet gardenia and as I
slide its surface across my lips I
imagine who might have torn the plastic wrapper:
A homeless woman seeking
just one ounce of glamor.
A single mother scrambling
to reach an interview.
A clutch of laughing,
purple-shadowed teens.


Is it wrong to sit here,
hail falling on gravel and skylight,
my children absent, learning of biomes and ABCs,
and absorb the stain of
someone else’s invisible longing
upon my fire- and spirit-warmed face?


- Amy Elizabeth Robinson

If You are a Man

If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.
The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.
To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.


- D.H. Lawrence

Photograph


my grandsons
spinning in their joy
universe
keep them turning turning
black blurs against the window
of the world
for they are beautiful
and there is trouble coming
round and round and round


- Lucille Clifton

The Fisherman


Although I can see him still.
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.


Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,


And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'


- William Butler Yeats

Waving Goodbye


A new suitcase in one hand,
car keys in the other and finally
off to college for the first time.

Looking back past the walnut tree
a last glance at the old house
his family still waving good-bye
good-bye from behind
the screened-in porch.

Shifting gears on Main Street,
thinking of things left behind
his old room and a medal from track
closet full of memories and old clothes
all still too good
to give away.

Homecoming for the thanksgiving feast
stunned at the barrenness of his room
just one change of socks and underwear remaining
in the top right drawer of the otherwise
empty chest.

Staring down the hallway at Christmas,
past the presents and the lighted tree
he saw his room was gone
the doorway and the door
across from his brother’s room.

At spring break under the walnut tree
staring again at the screened-in porch
he was certain
the house was gone.

Trying one last time in June
the porch was gone
the tree was gone
Main Street no where
to be found.

Driving away past his disappearing high school
he wondered was there a medal from track?
Had he ever had a brother?

Clutching the wheel in front
he knew he must hurry
his road disappearing
his town disappearing
and in the rear view mirror,
was that his life?
slowly waving
good-bye, good-bye?

- Doug von Koss

Squirrels


Something blurred, warmed
in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke
becoming tears;
but when you turned to look


the stoop was still, the pumpkin
and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk —
just a rattle
at the gutter and a sense


of curtains, somewhere, pulled.
Five of   them later, scarfing the oak’s
black bole,
laying a dream of snakes.


Needy and reticent
at once, these squirrels in charred November
recall, in Virgil,
what it is to feel:


moods, half-moods,
swarming, then darting loose; obscure
hunches that refuse
to speak, but still expect


in some flash of   luck
to be revealed. The less you try
to notice them,
the more they will know of  you.


- Nate Klug

The Otter and the Seaweed


This is what you need to know:
you need to know that otters wrap themselves
in seaweed so they won’t,
while sleeping at night, float out to sea . . .
Are you imagining this?
Can you see the otters actually doing this?
Does it break your heart a little?
Does it seduce you just a bit
into loving more
this odd hard world?
Oh otters, wrap yourselves tight! And sleep,
exactly like you do, floating but seaweed-held
in our salty living waters! Oh otters,
wrap yourselves tight! And you,
the one who doesn’t, the one who doesn’t
tether himself down right,
we are with you as you float away,
we are with you as you sleep
and lose yourself in the night.


- Teddy Macker

Poem for the day:

September

Detaching myself this autumn day
from world news, I turn to
the ravens and finches for
authentic reports. Walnuts drop,
cracking open just enough
for beaks to pry their meat
or squirrels to glean and plant
in their secret gardens.

"Last days for baths
in the fountain," broadcast the finches.
Eating and drinking, everyday toil,
I think how we share
a similar life, except for wars,
crime and generations of greed.

From what book do they learn
to sing? to roost each night
on a favorite branch, or turn up
half-way to the border, their annual
winter circuit balancing each
hemisphere with pinioned precision
and plumed, imponderable grace?

- Andrea English

Repeating History


In Krakow, on the hour
A trumpeter recalls
an interrupted call, warning invasion,
The alarm arrested by an arrow
piercing the psyche
of a people. Repeat


Everywhere, injuries
enshrined, history felt
Repeatedly, wounds
remembered. The wounded,
dead forgotten by the bowman,
marksman, indifferent
bomber. Forgotten by the one
who ordered the arrow.


We repeat, but cannot
delete fear, erase blood.
We repeat slights and stabs,
rapes and rage of the ages.


All of us are history
Redacted, invented
Stories of our innocence
And their guilt.


We carry our persistent culture,
Our ignorance of a fragile
Original root—a curious explorer
Into darkness, into


Separation from a whole
Which held us. Hewing a
Path toward more, a forked
Road, we move


Away from each other,
Away from ourselves.


- Rebecca del Rio

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Repeating History...

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Thanks for sharing this particularly beautiful, poignant, and haunting soft cry for the species to wake up. It moves me to register my discomfort and terror over the continued enshrining of 9-11 debris around the country. These memorials "am become death - the destroyer of worlds." They divide, condemn, justify the culture of bigotry-ridden permanent warfare.

Forgive me, Larry if these comments are inappropriate for your poetry postings. But today's poem moved me deeply and touched a nerve, as one who walked through WTC daily for five years as a young man, and who now quakes at the horrors being wrought in the name of our loss and grief.

Drought

The fir tree points
claw needles up
imploring rain
for greening
dry branches display
their prickle fingers
thirsting for mist
or thunder
Here ,now,there
brown spots appear
and nesting birds
peck up their beaks
Cawing for worm and water
Calling for nourishment
The fir tree groans
a stanza of its own
Rooted to ground
Beneath a cloudless sky
Rain…please…rain
Bless its sturdy stance
from root to tip
The fir stands
Defiant in all climate
every day is drier
There is fire on the way

- Maryann Schacht

No One Leaves Home


no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere


is safer than here


- Warshan Shire

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally – including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, ‘TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH’ (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology ‘The Salt Book of Younger Poets’ (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Warsan is also the unanimous winner of the 2013 Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize.

The New Colossus


Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"




- Emma Lazarus
New York City, 1883
(Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)

In Tribute to Etty Hillesum - Author of An Interrupted Life, Murdered at Auschwitz 10/30/43


(1)
There are enemies
who want to make
your world narrow
and they say
it’s not so bad, there are
plenty of shops that serve your kind,

but the fences tighten
and each morning the boundary gets closer
and there is no place left to go.

Etty, wakes to learn
the forest in her city
is closed to Jews.

The pleasure of a picnic
has been stolen
and to love life is a criminal transgression.

The few trees outside the window,
she writes
must be a forest for us now.

We must become full on meager
scraps of God’s world
trafficking illegal joy.


(2)
In 1942
they loaded cattle cars with Jews.
Etty said,
“All right. So now I learn
to travel light.

She took the Bible and
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke.

She said
“We’ll live
until we’re dead,”
and in the dark
she sat and read.


- Simone Denny

Prayer


Do you really think
that God cares
who wins the Super Bowl
or the lottery or the war
or who gets the parking place
or the promotion?


Don't waste your prayers
asking for special favors
of the One who has given
us our days and our nights,
our time on earth,
sequoias and poppies,
blue whales and blue herons
and - even more - each other.


Here is the only prayer I know
worth the breath.
Say it with me:
Wow!
Thank you!
Amen!


- Larry Robinson

Mystic

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the
experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.

- D.H. Lawrence

School Prayer


In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,

and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman

There, She is Gone! Here She Comes!


I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side
spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for
the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, I
stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck
of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle
with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone"!

"Gone where"?

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in
mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to
her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the
moment when someone at my side says, "There, she is gone"!
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other
voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes"!

- Henry Van Dyke

Sent this to a friend who likes ships.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

There, She is Gone! Here She Comes!

I am standing upon the seashore....

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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