Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Mankind’s Colonization Rhyme

Enscripted on the gates of the English colony town of Bandon, Ireland in 1600:

"Entrance to Jew, Turk or Atheist; but Death to Ye Bloody Papists".

At least these English colonists,
Determined Protestants, were rhyming racists.
Now a Papist was a Catholic
And the Irish Catholic were Native Gaelic.
Eire their land was their goddess mother
As it was to their Native American brother.
Both stood in the way of manifest destiny
But their land a jewel in the crown of hegemony,
A jingle in the coffers of the civilized,
Whose greed their deaths contrived.
Who took the land they desired
Because guns made them deserv-ed.
They were the strongest, wisest, fittest;
Morality guides the superior race-ist.
So what better for the vermin,
The uncouth heathens thick with sin,
Than civilization’s icon smack in their eye
To become English or American, better die.

- Brian McSweeney

Ghosts Are Watching Me

These are shell days
Echoes in the ear have names
and what they name is on a list
of things you wanted
What did you want in those
unremarkable days when
what was in your pocket
could buy the world?

Now, every little thing that
was wasted
walks down the street in the
early morning and waits for you
at the bus stop, wanting to
hold your hand
Of course there is weeping
Years later, the letters that
came in the mail
told us this was what
should be expected

And now, in my house,
ghosts are watching me
My plan is to uninvite them
because I am not finished
I never bought anything that
I couldn’t put a spell on
and I still feel dangerous
Sometimes, anyway

So look outside
Night falls and the creepy crawlies
prowl the street, their bodies
made of stars
That’s what I expected
Sometimes, in the company of
such gorgeous maniacs
all I can do is laugh

- Eleanor Lerman

October Corn

The stalks of corn in my vegetable garden a deep green not long ago have given way to a yellowing of old age. Once straight, tall and virile they now bend over like an old man, and my tomato plants are stressed from the cold night air of late October. The green ones will not grow or ripen. It pains me a little seeing the sweetness of summer fade day by day but it’s all a part of the plan you know; the strength of summer giving way to the aching bones of autumn.

In Petaluma parents find themselves meandering through The Corn Maze as their children run through the stalks or climb onto straw bales then choose a pumpkin to take home.

I remember trick or treating one year when my twin, Fernando and I were little boys; Tony, our big brother, dressed us as pirates I got an eye-patch, Fernando a handkerchief tied around his head. Tony made us wooden swords and had me go shirtless into the night. He said that a real pirate would brave the cold and so I refused to shiver and not allow the chill to penetrate beneath my skin. Our older sisters took us house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood in our frenzied drive for as much candy as we could gather; pirates pilfering booty. Only Christmas surpassed Halloween in fun and getting something good for simply being young. So many years later now, I am occupied by the business of grown-ups.

I read in the newspapers that the last of the apples and grapes are being harvested here at home as the wars continue to take their human toll; money squandered that could be used to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and cure the sick. It saddened me to read that Paul Newman had died. They say he was old and sick though I only knew him to be young, handsome and generous. Someone wrote a poem about his life the next day; glad that poets write about things that matter sometimes.

My grandaunt, Tia Sara, who lived in Mexico, died when I was ten. She was very old and very wrinkled. She always wore dark ankle-length dresses and flesh colored stockings that covered what little you could see of her ankles. Her long silver hair was always braided and pinned tightly against her scalp. She went to bed one night never to rise again. Ma’s cousin, my tia Concha washed Sara’s lifeless body, combed and braided her hair, powdered her face, applied rouge, and stuffed wads of newspaper in her mouth to plump up her cheeks, sunken in by death. The family had a traditional “velorio” for Sara. Laid her out in her living room surrounded by candles as everyone knelt and prayed for her soul. My uncles dug her grave and buried her the next day. She received a proper memorial service even if she was a gossip who constantly doled out advice that was not asked for. My ma and pa, tios, tias and some amigos have passed on; irreplaceable losses. Sad that they are not with me at least they visit once in a while in dreams; I take some comfort knowing that one day I will be with them.

And I love the Day of the Dead, a custom rooted in the ancient Mexico. A way to honor those who have passed to the other world; a way to accept and even poke fun at, instead of fearing death. I suppose that by doing this we prepare ourselves for our own inevitable engagement with him.

We can fear or laugh and even accept him, for in the end we have no choice in the matter; it is all a part of the plan; are we not like stalks of corn in a garden? small tender sprouts in spring, strong and sturdy in summer, frail in autumn, dried and lifeless in winter.

Let us be like the sketches of skeletons who play music, dance and sing; hence replacing fear with a fiesta. Let us celebrate then, for today we are on this side of the great divide honoring those who have passed to the other hoping that one day we will be remembered and respected in the same manner even if we are imperfect. Raise your cups of atole of chocolate caliente raise your pan dulce: here’s to life mis hermanos y hermanas, here’s to death.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

All Souls
Cougnac Cave, France


Many corners turned beneath
pencil-thin stalactites, thousands
like upside down candles,
wet flames dripping.
Beyond my mind's
violence, there,
an ibex painted
in stalactite-milk
with wall-ooze for
a shaggy coat. Will it always
be buried? Memory
stumbling into mineral stillness.
crystallized, almost lucid, or carried -
a forgotten animal across
my shoulders, radiant
and awash in lactation, made
with hand, mouth, spit.
Dear friend, I remember
being painted
in coal and blood,
and the long gallery
where all souls parade.


- Ann Marie Macari

Biniam Habte, a 20-year-old Eritrean, who had crossed the Sahara in his quest to reach Europe, told a British newspaper reporter in Calais: “On the journey I have made, you carry your life like an egg in your hand.”

Carry Your Life

What does it mean to carry your life
A thing so fragile, so vital
It might burst from your careful
Ministrations and escape to an
Unseen fate?

Do we know that we
Carry our lives or must
Our existence be threatened
For us to awaken to our
Precious, quixotic nature?

A gift, this animated body
Everyday it does the soul's
Labor, the heart's will,
Stirred by a curious
Mind—active and demanding.

Within the body's kind surrender,
We labor, live our illusions
Ask for more, insist.
Unaware or unwilling, we ignore
The delicate light we carry inside.

And in our ignorance,
A hardening begins—
Against our own vulnerability
The vulnerability of all our
Kind. Together we awaken

See ourselves in others, ask how
Do we carry the defenseless eggs
Of others as they cross
Our lives? How will we allow
Ourselves to be carried?

- Rebecca del Rio

The Poets Hang On

The poets hang on.
It’s hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it’s been tried.
We pass them on the road
standing there with their begging bowls,
an ancient custom.
Nothing in those now
but dried flies and bad pennies.
They stare straight ahead.
Are they dead, or what?
Yet they have the irritating look
of those who know more than we do.

More of what?
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
If you try for a simple answer,
that’s when they pretend to be crazy,
or else drunk, or else poor.
They put those costumes on
some time ago,
those black sweaters, those tatters;
now they can’t get them off.
And they’re having trouble with their teeth.
That’s one of their burdens.
They could use some dental work.

They’re having trouble with their wings, as well.
We’re not getting much from them
in the flight department these days.
No more soaring, no radiance,
no skylarking.
What the hell are they paid for?
(Suppose they are paid.)
They can’t get off the ground,
them and their muddy feathers.
If they fly, it’s downwards,
into the damp grey earth.

Go away, we say -
and take your boring sadness.
You’re not wanted here.
You’ve forgotten how to tell us
how sublime we are.
How love is the answer:
we always liked that one.
You’ve forgotten how to kiss up.
You’re not wise any more.
You’ve lost your splendor.

But the poets hang on.
They’re nothing if not tenacious.
They can’t sing, they can’t fly.
They only hop and croak
and bash themselves against the air
as if in cages,
and tell the odd tired joke.
When asked about it, they say
they speak what they must.
Cripes, they’re pretentious.

They know something, though.
They do know something.
Something they’re whispering,
something we can’t quite hear.
Is it about sex?
Is it about dust?
Is it about love?

- Margaret Atwood

From “Letters to my Probable Selves”

The letter in my unsent email file
Begun a year ago. Before.
Revisited now. After.

Questions we have been asking for fifty years:
What if. When. Who. Which one of us first. How.

So many poems dealing with loss.
With death. The sudden losses.
The long, drawn out ones.
The sense of how fragile our lives are.
“Fragility.” Probably the most important piece in my book,
but balanced by “Clarity.” The two flanks.
Libra, holding her own.

The losses keep adding up. At the heart of it all,
Adrianne. Loss of a poet. Loss of a friend.
My sense of her continued presence is deep.
She understood my love for Madge.
And I understood her passion for poetry.
For William. For Eve. For her dogs.
For her last wolfdog, Lady Macbeth.

You told me you have been sick.
Are you well now? I don't know.
So much I don't know.

What I do know:
Madge thinks only of me now,
Of how I will cope after her death.

”This isn’t the way we planned it, is it?” she said.
“No” I answered.

How does anyone know. The when.
The how.

I have this sense that it is okay to send you
what I am thinking.
Feeling. But is it?
I don’t really know.

- fran claggett

​Ten Questions For The New Age

Why does someone who takes the name Buffalo Vision, for example,
after his weekend ayahuasca workshop

always seem to have an unwarranted confidence
that he is going to end up at the Happy Hunting Ground?

If Eagle Mountain marries Western River Woman - fine.
But why do they have to name their daughter Blueberry, or Lake?

Then they send her to suffer at a Waldorf school
where she majors in birch bark and folk dance

and years later has to hire a life coach to help her fill out college applications,
as she painstakingly writes an autobiographical essay

on the theme of how certain so-called sentient beings
can inflict their embarrassing illusions upon another.

Do you get what I'm talking about?
About the follies of playing at innocence?

Walt Disney made some good movies,
but would you really get ten aphoristic sayings from The Lion King

tattooed on your forearm for practical reference
as you ship out to Iraq?

Which brings me to my actual subject, a man I will call Steve,
whom I met at a rest stop right after his second vision quest;

who wore a feather in his hat, was fifty-five, well-fed,
and lived with his mom in Carson City; who

plays his guitar at open mikes and plans on a serious musical career
as soon as he gets more experience.

Steve, who prefers to be called by his true name, Iron Bear.
Whenever I encounter the New Age still in its original diapers,

I confess that I blush down to my deepest roots,
for I, too, am its scornful, not entirely grown-up child.

When I was twenty, I learned to play "Blowin' in the Wind" on a wooden flute;
I made bracelets out of wire and polished quartz and gave them away.

I had a girlfriend who freely expressed her opinion
that people born in Bangladesh had probably incarnated there

to work out their issues with poverty.

Why does the New Age seem so often like a patient in intensive care,
in a delicate condition, requiring giant infusions of illusion

and charity to stay alive,

while the rest of us keep waiting for the day it might get tough enough
to be successfully transplanted into the real world?

Getting back to Steve, still living with his mom, on an allowance, in Carson City:
Nothing can stop him

from going to the open mike every Thursday night and singing his heart out,
or from signing his letter Blessings, from Iron Bear, Poet and Seer, aka Steve.

Pretend for a moment that you are a philanthropist whom I am
asking for a donation to a charitable program

to rehabilitate wandering middle-aged children like the ones I am describing.
What funds can you offer? What advice would you have for me?

What chance do think there is for Steve to ever grow up,
much less find a happy ending?

On the other hand, isn't it some kind of ultimate foolishness
to scold cheerful people who in their way are the pilgrims of our time

about the folly of their happiness?
What kind of folly is that?


- Tony Hoagland

We Are A River


Our life has not been an ascent

up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.

*

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.

- Lao Tzu
(translation by William Martin)

And their work informs our souls.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Poets Hang On

The poets hang on.
It’s hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it’s been tried.
We pass them on the road
standing there with their begging bowls,
an ancient custom.
Nothing in those now
but dried flies and bad pennies.
They stare straight ahead.
Are they dead, or what?
Yet they have the irritating look
of those who know more than we do.

More of what?
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
If you try for a simple answer,
that’s when they pretend to be crazy,
or else drunk, or else poor.
They put those costumes on
some time ago,
those black sweaters, those tatters;
now they can’t get them off.
And they’re having trouble with their teeth.
That’s one of their burdens.
They could use some dental work.

They’re having trouble with their wings, as well.
We’re not getting much from them
in the flight department these days.
No more soaring, no radiance,
no skylarking.
What the hell are they paid for?
(Suppose they are paid.)
They can’t get off the ground,
them and their muddy feathers.
If they fly, it’s downwards,
into the damp grey earth.

Go away, we say -
and take your boring sadness.
You’re not wanted here.
You’ve forgotten how to tell us
how sublime we are.
How love is the answer:
we always liked that one.
You’ve forgotten how to kiss up.
You’re not wise any more.
You’ve lost your splendor.

But the poets hang on.
They’re nothing if not tenacious.
They can’t sing, they can’t fly.
They only hop and croak
and bash themselves against the air
as if in cages,
and tell the odd tired joke.
When asked about it, they say
they speak what they must.
Cripes, they’re pretentious.

They know something, though.
They do know something.
Something they’re whispering,
something we can’t quite hear.
Is it about sex?
Is it about dust?
Is it about love?

- Margaret Atwood

---

You sure do find some insight-ful stuff, Larry. And relating this poem to another discussion on Wacco bb; Do we think Steve should be housed in a tiny house, or a shelter? It brings to mind the dilemma that a family had this week whose son/brother died from exposure/or other, in downtown Santa Rosa having refused their offer to have him come home. These are important discussions which we avoid because of the dilemmas they present and our unwillingness or inability to act.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

​...Getting back to Steve, still living with his mom, on an allowance, in Carson City: Nothing can stop him...

---

Describe Your Grief

I am driving a back road
where there are still farms,
fenced cattle, tobacco barns.

I can’t describe my grief,
unless it’s like marching
into a lost war, folding clothes by numbers,
waiting in rank for breakfast
beneath the steamy electric lights
before dawn, crawling in a cave
that hasn’t been mapped.

I round a curve and see two birds
flapping in the road.
One has been hit
by a car, and its mate
flutters just above,
wild to inspire
its fallen partner’s flight.

When Anna was ill,
I would have seen her as the fallen bird,
injured in the road, as I hovered,
watching her struggles,
urging her to fly on broken wings.

But now she is gone,
with our marathon conversations,
her startling questions.

And I don’t know
which of those two birds
I am.

- Tom Hawkins

Tracking at Auschwitz

Went tracking at Auschwitz,
looking for animal signs-
tracks, scat, anything.

There was plenty of human spoor but
the only life I saw
was a raptor
perch hunting
from a
bent steel post
of a once electrified
barbed wire
fence.

- George Gittleman

Tornadoes

Not all tornadoes
rip--ravage wide swaths
across grasslands, the flat prairies
nor deep into the wet pungent air
of old plantation country.
No! No Joplin nor Tuscaloosa, here.
These drop,
bomb-like
from the
turbulent
skies of
my mind,
dip down
randomly
here and
there and
lay waste
to all I
have
made
for my
self
over
the
years—
those sturdy structures, carefully placed,
laboriously raised across the landscape of my soul—
my sanctuaries, my havens—
the places where I go to know
the peace of self acceptance.
Gone, now!

And when those turbulent skies have cleared,
I stand amidst the ruin and the rubble
and I look up and I find distant points of light
that tell me where I am
and I know, then,
I will build again
a place for myself.


- Bill Denham

Falling Horse

Ochre, and the black line
of mane painted soft on the wall, legs
pointing up. Who knows how
to fall without landing, to pass through
each dimension upside down? Forgotten,
the upper world and all that light.

Why do you haunt me?
For a little while I want to be alone
with the animals, with the cold stone
and my lamp. The black mane
caresses the horse's head,
floating between us.

- Ann Marin Macari

Before Dark

They used to mass
in the crowns of oaks
on every street for blocks around
but have gone elsewhere,
the evening no longer
gathered by their feathers
but by the leaves, which blot
whatever light is left to the sky.

Whether we saw the crows
as a barely worth mentioning
image of death for the way
they took over branches
with perfect authority,
whether, where did I hear it, their
numbers were thinned by disease,
nothing avails. They are

missing, the crackle of wings
against the weight of their flight,
beaks that broke open
broadcasting any scrap of news.
Like our children, they carry off
whole years, like the wind-borne thought
of cries never welcome enough
day or night in our ears.

- Jennifer Barber

Felix Crow
Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.

- Kay Ryan

Any News

The black bird on the bent tower

where the windmill used to turn

on that deserted farm in Illinois

is still waiting in the falling rain

for any news, any sign

that tomorrow

might be better.

- Doug von Koss

Fall Song
It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for ‘‘divine’’?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.
- Joy Harjo

Clearing

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing
in the dense forest of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.
- Martha Postlewaite

Proclamation


Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.
Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;
Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free - despite all
fire and anger and fear;
Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling - a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.


- Kim Stafford

Rise and Fall - Larry Robinson

Rise and Fall

Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.

Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.

Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.

Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.

Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.

- Larry Robinson

perfect.

Oooh, great one, Larry!

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Rise and Fall - Larry Robinson


Rise and Fall


Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.


Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.


Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.


Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.


Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.


Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.


Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.


- Larry Robinson

---

Song

There are those who are trying to set fire to the world,
we are in danger,
there is time only to work slowly,
there is no time not to love.

- Deena Metzger

To Those Who Have Lost Everything

crossed
in despair
many deserts
full of hope

carrying
their empty
fists of sorrow
everywhere

mouthing
a bitter night
of shovels
and nails

“you’re nothing
you’re shit
your home’s
nowhere”—

mountains
will speak
for you

rain
will flesh
your bones

green again
among ashes
after a long fire

started in
a fantasy island
some time ago

turning
Natives
into aliens

- Francisco X. Alarcón

Every Revolution Needs Fresh Poems

Every revolution needs fresh poems
that is the reason
poetry cannot die.
It is the reason poets
go without sleep
and sometimes without lovers
without new cars
and without fine clothes
the reason we commit
to facing the dark
and
resign ourselves, regularly, to the possibility
of being wrong.
Poetry is leading us.
It never cares how we will
be held by lovers
or drive fast
or look good
in the moment;
but about how completely
we are committed
to movement
both inner and outer;
and devoted to transformation
and to change.


- Alice Walker

The Ripening

This Living
has softened the hard fruit
of my being

Everyday, tenderness
claims more of me
taking me holy
into ripeness

Let me not
fall from the branch
ripe but untasted

Rather, let the Beloved
pluck me in ripeness
and pierce me with His bite

Releasing the juicy
fullness of my life
to run down His arm
like tears of gratitude,
like tears of devotion

But,
if fall I must
untasted
melting into the earth

Let that nourishing decay
be my devotion
spreading out in a pool
of returning

the essential elements
of my being

- Kay Crista

Africa revisited

Tell me about your trip to Africa, the liv ely wild creatures inhabiting that continent.
Remind me again of how they appeared to you.
Just another day in the life for them, A small miracle for you.

You hike dusty African hills with no guarantee that you will be invited in, to observe their world.
Will you be welcomed to a dappled glimpse of fur and chiseled teeth?
Alone at night, will you be somewhat disturbed by distant roaring base sounds heard instead of words?

A profound gift of savannah life is handed to you, on an earth l y platter.
Your easy presence is considered in a flash then filed away, as
neither predator nor prey, just a heart beat in the distance.

Tell me again about your trip to Africa, deep jungle's roar at night, hyena's fulsome laughter carried on slight wind.
Remind me once again of how the unbidden occurs whether we allow it or not,
Remind me too of the ways grace rains down on each of us lively wild creatures, uninvited and ever-present.

- Ann Krinard

To My Favorite Seventeen Year-Old High School Girl

Do you realize that if you had started
building the Parthenon, on the day you were born
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that alone,
so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.
You’re a love for simply being yourself.
But did you know that, at your age Judy Garland
was pulling down $150,000 per picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,
and Blase Pascal had cleaned up his room?
No, wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life
after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom, or, at least, pick up all your socks.
For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey
was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,
but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,
four operas, and two complete masses as a youngster.
But of course that was in Austria at the height
of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you are special by just being you,
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

- Billy Collins

Prayer For The Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through the wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
in our mind so be it.

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave, and aware
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep—he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars—and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.

so be it.

- Gray Snyder

Blessing The Bones

I sit alone at the kitchen table,
barbecued chicken bones lie heaped
like dead soldiers on my plate.
I lick the sauce from the bones.
I feel carnal and content
and then I think of grandma.
I could be her as I enjoy
this solitary meal.

She is dressed in a long straight skirt,
a short-sleeved cotton blouse.
Her apron is spotted, her stockings
sag down around her ankles, her toes
poke through worn slippers.
I watch her soak crusts of bread
in pan drippings, take her fork and balance
bits of lamb and potatoes on top.
She always ate last, but best of all.

I think of her long, un-mothered life -
just twelve when she boarded
the boat to Ellis Island, a child
sent alone by her family to seek a better life.
She was not blue-blood, never lost
her accent or peasant ways,
heard American neighbors call her
immigrant or less.

I think of her homeland under seige.
I could be dying there now,
our home downed by mortar shells.
I could be eating rationed bread,
the only bones those of slaughtered sons.
I could be cleaning a daughter's ravaged flesh.

I want to cry out to grandma,
cry out so the heavens will open
and angels bring her closer.
I want to hold her, smell her skin,
bury my head in her feeble shoulders,
run my fingers through her white hair,
kiss away her sadness.

I want to cover her table
with a white Damask cloth,
set out a feast, exchange
her black babooshka for the
milliner's finest red felt hat.
I want to thank her for my life,
say that I understand her sacrifice.

I want to bless her bones.

- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Gratitude


What did you notice?

The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...10-29-06-1.png

the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

What did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;
the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;
the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the
pale green wand;
at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid
beauty of the flowers;
then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,
her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue, her
recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her
sturdy legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;
the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;
the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;
the tall, blank banks of sand;
the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;
the sea and its triangles;
the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green breast of the hummingbird;
the eye of the pond;
the wet face of the lily;
the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;
the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;
the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve
of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

- Mary Oliver

Family Reunion


The week in August you come home,
adult, professional, aloof,
we roast and carve the fatted calf
—in our case homegrown pig, the chine
garlicked and crisped, the applesauce
hand-pressed. Handpressed with greengage wine.


Nothing is cost effective here.
The peas, the beets, the lettuces
handsown, are raised to stand apart.
The electric fence ticks like the slow heart
of something we fed and bedded for a year,
then killed with kindness’s one bullet
and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering.


In winter we lure the birds with suet,
thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat.
Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring
of wire that keeps raccoons from the corn
to the gouged pine table that we lounge around,
distressed before any of you was born.


Benign and dozy from our gluttonies,
the candles down to stubs, defenses down,
love leaking out unguarded the way
juice dribbles from the fence when grounded
by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe,
how eloquent, how beautiful you seem!


Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,
ballooning to overfill our space,
the almost-parents of your parents now.
So briefly having you back to measure us
is harder than having let you go.


- Maxine Kumin

They've lost it, lost it,
and their children
will never even wish for it-
and I am afraid
that the whole tribe's in trouble,
the whole tribe is lost-
because the sun keeps rising
and these days
nobody sings


- Aaron Kramer

Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

- Richard Wilbur

Listening to the Koln Concert

After we had loved each other intently,

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...0_09-53-30.png

we heard notes tumbling together,
in late winter, and we heard ice
falling from the ends of twigs.

The notes abandon so much as they move.
They are the food not eaten, the comfort
not taken, the lies not spoken.
The music is my attention to you.

And when the music came again,
later in the day, I saw tears in you r eyes.
I saw you turn your face away
so that the others would not see.

When men and women come together,
how much they have to abandon! Wrens
make their nests of fancy threads
and string ends, animals

abandon all their money each year.
What is that men and women leave?
Harder then wrens' doing, they have
to abandon their longing for the perfect.

The inner nest not made by instinct
will never be quite round,
and each has to enter the nest
made by the other imperfect bird.

- Robert Bly

Love After Love

The day will come when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say,
sit here, eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine, give bread.
Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

- Derek Walcott

This Making of a Whole Self


This making of a whole self takes
such a very long time: pieces are not
sequential nor our supplies. We work here,
then there, hold up tattered fabric to the light.
Sew past dark, intent. Use all our thread.

Sleeves may come before length;
buttons, before a rounded neck.
We sew at what most needs us,
and as it asks, sew again.

The self is not one thing, once made,
unaltered. Not midnight task alone, not
after other work. It’s everything we come
upon, make ours: all this fitting of
what-once-was and has-become.

- Nancy Shaffer

Fog Drip

Fog drip, they say,

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...3_13-59-46.png

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

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

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

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

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

- Larry Robinson

A Thank You Message Written for her Family at Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, my beloved family.

As this time of year rolls around and we look at what we're thankful for,
I'd have to say that what I'm most grateful for is my family.
We are all here because we are the descendants of something greater than our own lives,
and that is our family's lineage.
We hold our place in a sequence of lives,
a lineage of people who knew pain and joy, hope and despair,
who were capable of greatness and generosity, as well as pettiness and spite.
You are the next generations.
You hold the key to the future and the link to memory.
You are the living legacy of all the ancestors who have gone before you.
Although much of our history and its players remain unknown to us,
never forget that there is an invisible line of men and women who
stand behind each of you and stretches back through time, farther than we can see.
This moment is the culmination of every thought, action, feeling and
circumstance of all of their lives added to all of your grandparents' lives,
your parents' lives and now your lives.
In this season of gratitude and remembering, I ask you to take a moment
to consider your place in this lineage, to imagine what the faces must look like
that stand silently behind you, to consider what their dreams may have been and
how you are the answer to their prayers.
Then look forward, to the children who come after you, to their children and beyond.
What would you like to leave as a legacy for them?
What prayers beat in your heart for them?
For my part, I know that you are the living answers to my prayers.
On behalf of all of your ancestors may I say, Thank you for choosing us.

- Diana Del Drago

Holiday Poem

Everyone wants a piece of you.
Even the elderly oaks, their
branches draped with lichen
lace, are reaching long
limbs towards your body
as you pass.
The demands are ceaseless,
it seems. The ways to say
yes, change direction,
possibly crumble. Still,
you let the branches brush you.
Until you hear the rushing
of the downhill stream,
the wide green hand of the
mountain letting go, letting forth.
It asks nothing.
You lean into,
you follow
that sound.

- Amy Elizabeth Robinson

Meeting The Light Completely

Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
"What fools we were, not to have seen."

- Jane Hirshfield

December 7^th Prayer

Like a distressed baby,
crying in an empty room,
I used to pray.

Now I just wait expectantly
till clarity comes,
often vexing me greatly
with what it has to say,
as if daring me to stare at the sun.

Or, slowly cooking a thick slab of puzzlement,
avoiding all recipes’ tedium,
I keep turning and turning
till I get a well-seared response
to a question that refuses to leave.

Sometimes I’m like a clumsy country doctor,
vainly trying to pin down a persistent pain’s true cause,
poking and prodding,
ineptly seeking to know what’s up,
only to find that what’s not up
is what I ought to seek.

Amazed that the head on collision of one sperm and one egg,
in the fierce run up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
led to the odd duck who bears my name,
I am lately bemused by the wondrous strangeness of it all,
and regret, ever so slightly, that no one can hear me when,
my solitary heart wishing that it were not so,
I yearn to say, “Thanks for all this blessing.”

- Bill Dickinson

Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper

The front page reports
120 soldiers were killed

the war was long
you get used to it

right next to this news
of a spectacular crime
with the killer’s photo

Mr. Cogito’s gaze
moves with indifference
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with great relish
into the quotidian macabre

a thirty-year-old farmworker
in a state of manic depression
murdered his own wife
and two small children

we are told the exact
way they were killed
the position of the bodies
and the other details

it’s no use trying to find
120 lost men on a map
a distance too remote
hides them like a jungle

they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero on the end
turns them into an abstraction

a theme for further reflection:
the arithmetic of compassion.

- Zbigniew Herbert

Lost in thought

I want to get lost in those thoughts
that continue expanding

way out over the clouds
rising into nests of stars

migrating across seas, flying
into wild new geographies of meaning.

I want to get carried away
from all that is manageable and trivial,

all that is self-defeating
all that shrivels the heart
binds the feet and shrink wraps a soul.

I want to get lost with those spacious thoughts
that amaze, like stories,

building syllable upon syllable,
word after word, until, in the end,

the plot gives way
to holy incomprehension,

I want to say yes to all
that bids us to the window
and across the door step

where rustling satin notes of sky
sing us into whole landscapes
of yet unspoken poetry.


- Judith Stone

There Is No Going Back


No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

- Wendell Berry

Races

You are a Brother
And a Sister
In the colors of Life
Some people believe
They are races
Human races
Whatever that may be
Races are for running
The competitive edge
Distrust and confusion
Leaving alterations
In innocent faces
We are natural Life
A part of Mother Earth's design
A blending of colorsTo make the difference
In the teaching
of meanings
We are colors in the family
of Life.

- John Trudell
(February 15, 1946 – December 8, 2015)

Thanks For Remembering Us

The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they're not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can't
throw out a gift we've never owned.

- Dana Gioia