thanks for remembering Mrs. King with such eloquence, Larry
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thanks for remembering Mrs. King with such eloquence, Larry
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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
God Does Not Answer Prayer
God does not answer prayer.
It is a sacrilege to think so.
An insult to the god-drenched hearts
of all who pray through the night
and in the morning are nonetheless
handed a dead child.
The churches in Salem used to burn heretics
to increase attendance. Now those who feel
their prayer didn't reach quite far enough,
that they were not pure enough,
are victims of a merciless atheism
that says all good fortune comes from God
though the brutal often prosper
and it is not uncommon to torture
the pure of heart.
We pray for the best, forgetting
the unpredictable unfolding
that must occur for us to learn
prayer for others works better
than for ourselves. Jesus prays
in the garden of Gethsemane
and is refused. Ten thousand,
ten million prayers rise in Latin,
Arabic, Hindi, and Hebrew
yet their husbands and wives,
children and sisters, fathers and brothers
do not survive well if at all
though in their chest beats the strong sacred heart.
No prayers are granted, none denied.
True prayer reaches well beyond the edge of the world.
It enters head bowed into the arms of the Beloved.
- Stephen Levine
(7/17/1937-1/17/2016)
There’s A Beat
There’s a beat,
and a sound there,
you hear it,
and a tone when we feel it,
a meter to the planet,
and such majesty to life.
There’s the song of our emotions
in the syncopation of our confusions,
and the cry of our devotions
to the heart’s expansive score.
There’s a melody to take us
through the storms of our rehearsals,
through the seasons we must improvise
a counterpoint to dying.
Oh holy music made of love and suffering,
bathe us in your colors.
Let the silence still us
to the ache in our fingers and our bones.
Let us find the harmony,
the notes that plot a passage,
that spell a message of reflection and protection,
if only we will trust and pay attention,
trust and pay attention
to the intervals that link us,
the relations that give meaning
in our symphony of loss.
- Tim Hicks
Bedrock
a message from my father
may I counsel you
from this distance
25 years after cremation
most of the fire extinguished
ashes scattered in four directions
our cup of sorrows aged like wine
allow me to cradle your head
and look into your eyes
allow me to make my amends
to soothe the hurt i caused
to nudge you toward a new calm
here, in the eye of the storm
now, let’s get down to bedrock
there is no perspective to defend
nor angle on which to balance
nothing to fix or forgive
your life is enough
hold it in your lap like a newborn
never cease to be amazed
by the shimmer
of your own soul
expect nothing
greet everything
raise the cup, drink deeply
- Fran Carbonaro
Blessed Disillusion
I thought it would be sudden,
instead it is gradual, graceful.
The sky falls leisurely.
A Chagall sky, it breaks
apart, slices of cobalt,
creamy eddies of clouds
drift down like feathers,
freed. Little by little,
pieces liberate, float down like ash
wafting away from the whole.
Here, chunks of indigo, shot
through with streaks of sunset, morning
silver. Venus shines in my hands.
Mars burns my eyes.
The sky lies at my feet
slices and wedges.
I pick them up, wonder,
turn them in my hands,
Warp and weft without the whole.
It happens unhurriedly. I always thought
it would be sudden. The sky would fall.
Instead it slips gradually from its moorings.
Overhead measureless emptiness
wheels and turns.
- Rebecca del Rio
MushroomsRising surreptitiously in the nightthese low lives cower in shadegossiping and whispering musty secrets.They conspire with rotting wood;some shake mute bells in cow dung.some come with death in damp pouches.You know them allthese bloodless friends of nightwho make no sound under the knife. - Robert Samarotto
Outside
The least little sound sets the coyotes walking,
walking the edge of our comfortable earth.
We look inward, but all of them
are looking toward us as they walk the earth.
We need to let animals loose in our houses,
the wolf to escape with a pan in his teeth,
and streams of animals toward the horizon
racing with something silent in each mouth.
For all we have taken into our keeping
and polished with our hands belongs to a truth
greater than ours, in the animal´s keeping.
Coyotes are circling around our truth.
- William Stafford
For the Family and Friends of a Suicide
As you huddle around the torn silence,
Each by this lonely deed exiled
To a solitary confinement of soul,
May some glow from what has been lost
Return like the kindness of candlelight.
As your eyes strain to sift
This sudden wall of dark
And no one can say why
In such a forsaken, secret way,
This death was sent for...
May one of the lovely hours
Of memory return
Like a field of ease
Among these graveled days.
May the Angel of Wisdom
Enter this ruin of absence
And guide your minds
To receive this bitter chalice
So that you do not damage yourselves
By attending only at the hungry altar
Of regret and anger and guilt.
May you be given some inkling
That there could be something else at work
And that what to you now seems
Dark, destructive, and forlorn,
Might be a destiny that looks different
From inside the eternal script.
May vision be granted to you
To see this with the eyes of providence.
May your loss become a sanctuary
Where new presence will dwell
To refine and enrich
The rest of your life
With courage and compassion.
And may your lost loved one
Enter into the beauty of eternal tranquility,
In that place where there is no more sorrow
Or separation or mourning or tears.
- John O'Donohue
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
- Lisel Mueller
Tree Marriage
In Chota Nagpur and Bengal
the betrothed are tied with threads to
mango trees, they marry the trees
as well as one another, and
the two trees marry each other.
Could we do that some time with oaks
or beeches? This gossamer we
hold each other with, this web
of love and habit is not enough.
In mistrust of heavier ties,
I would like tree-siblings for us,
standing together somewhere, two
trees married with us, lightly, their
fingers barely touching in sleep,
our threads invisible but holding.
- William Meredith
The Optimist’s Bag
It slouches on the foyer table
tries to look invisible
but its innards jive
like a troop of spider monkeys
playing Twister in a pillow slip.
Like Pinocchio in the cavern of Monstruo’s belly
they holler, let us out!
Desire is the loudest.
It rattles the buckles from
deep within the leather folds.
Loneliness picks up the chorus
in call and response.
Next the twins, tenderness and hope—
smooth white hands soft as school girls’—
pick at the lock
while tongues of connection
slide over the gaping rim
and force it open
like a bellows pushing air
fanning the lilies of lust.
Your eyes track the play-by-play
like dreamtime pupils.
When you reach for it
the bag plays dead.
- Sandra Anfang
Wedded to the Darkness
Only when the storm comes
roaring off the wild California coast
bringing its raging rain and wind
swirling around the edges of my fears
can I know the power
of the magnificent roots of the old oak tree
clinging like a net of tangled hair
twisted and knotted into the earth
wedded to the dark
holding the swaying branch-laden tree
firmly to its source.
Only then can I feel
and bow down to the darkness
to the fertile terrain
where life is held and nourished
Only then can I know
I depend on the darkness for light.
- Judith Shiner
Otter Sight
After three days of rain
the Laguna is doing its old job -
keeping the river from flooding downstream.
A vast sheet of water welcomes
incoming flights of mallards and grebes.
Egrets poke around the margins,
their serpentine stealth yielding
bounties of frogs and crawdads.
Ripples spreading around the bend of the current
herald their whiskered faces:
the otters I have long heard of
but never, until now, seen.
The new neighbor says
“I bought the place for the view.”
I say “You got a good one.”
- Larry Robinson
Millennium blessing
There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.
It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.
It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us to surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.
We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.
But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.
And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.
And that is what we sing about.
- Stephen Levine
Added my Illustration & typography to the poem.
Dear Sebastopol -
Hard not to get dizzy, here, under tides of scent -
how they grade and terrace the air.
salt thick tang of wet earth fat with limestone
against sweet rot of wind falls.
Pine sap town built on stolen ground.
Wagon rutted streets. Hills once lush
with redwood and oak, cleared
to the root for acres of orchards.
Century-wide berths of scrub oaks
smoldering in the Laguna de Santa Rosa
A train that carried its screaming
weight down Main Street for nearly 100 years.
But the WPA mural on the post office wall
still frames the hard won promise:
neat rows of apple trees
flanked by white chicken coops.
Once, your accepted story swallowed me under its bell glass sky.
Now I wake slowly. Learn to waver
in the air above what history we’ve learned,
sense what’s pushing up underneath.
- Iris Jamahl Dunkle
O, Pilgrim!
O pilgrim, where have you been?
Where are you now?
While you have been searching the world
the Beloved has been here all along
waiting for you.
Let the caravan carry you home
to your deepest heart’s desire.
The treasure you sought was buried in your own garden.
Come home, o wanderer, and behold the face in the mirror.
Look behind the eyes and see the One
who has been searching for you.
You are seen;
you are known
and you are beloved.
If your seeking has brought you here at last,
you know that there is nowhere else to go
and nothing more to say.
- Jellaludin Rumi
(version by Larry Robinson)
At a Workshop with Bill Plotkin ~ a poem for the beloved
Called to the gate
chain-linked to the long wooden fence
running along the road into Commonmweal
I wanted to climb over you,
sit atop the highest bar,
remembering rodeos
and other echoes of the forgotten West
But instead I unhooked the chain
and sat beside you, inside the enclosed field,
drawn also by the standing poles
and the mysterious wires anchoring them
to the ground and to each other
Such a powerful symbol of our (post)modern industrial culture
Let me love YOU!
You too must be alive,
carrying within yourself
some longing for wholeness
underneath the layers of power, greed and domination
that have so distorted the promise of your gift
(thinking of Rilke and how the ore wants to go back into the mountain)
Just so, the wires and wirelesses of our global interconnection
want to reach into our deepest beings
to touch our deeper longings
Blessings and gratitude
to those heroes of our day,
setting free the dirty secrets
of our wars - against each other
and against the earth
The Chelsea Mannings and the Julian Asanges,
the Edward Snowdens,
the warriors of the West,
sparking our imaginations
with the fires of freedom
and the passion for justice, integrity and honor
Respect for ALL beings
May we discover, in the depths of our own beings,
the way forward into a world that celebrates
connection, wholeness,
ringing forth a song of joy
over the wires that weave in and out
of our lives here together
on this most glorious earth
- Debora Hammond
Burning
Midday sun a smear,
a shimmering smudge burning behind
slate skies, burning
through hopelessness and hope.
There is always burning.
Somewhere fields are burning to clear
for crops: cane, corn, poppies.
Spirits burn in defiance of helplessness.
Burning somewhere
palaces, markets, monuments,
broad hallways, humble homes alight
with someone’s certainty.
Always burning somewhere,
Bodies burn against bulldozer
blades poised to bury lies, secrets. Bodies
in Poland, Guatemala, Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine.
There is always burning,
libraries burn, also oil wells,
dreams, outrage and grief
Pushed to the grave’s edge.
In America and Africa
children burn with hunger, confusion,
mothers burn with sorrow, outrage.
Grandmothers gaze at the sun,
imagine a future
poised on the sun’s corona, tumbling
End over dazzling end
until time itself ends.
- Rebecca del Rio
A Zero-Circle
Be helpless and dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come
from grace to gather us up.
We are too dulleyed to see the beauty.
If we say "Yes we can," we¹ll be lying.
If we say "No, we don¹t see it,"
that "No" will behead us
and shut tight our window into spirit.
So let us not be sure of anything,
beside ourselves, and only that, so
miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero-circle, mute,
we will be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, "Lead us."
When we¹ve totally surrendered to that beauty,
we¹ll become a mighty kindness.
- Jelalludin Rumi
Mathnawi IV, 3748-3754
(Translation by Coleman Barks)
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Jelalludin Rumi
(Coleman Barks translation)
What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?
I don’t want to change
my thoughts.
I want to change
the way I think.
I want to think
in images, in stories
spun as threads
arising long and slow
out of culture and
out of the Grandmother Spider
of indigenous mind.
I want to learn
to live in the old ways,
the ways of spirit.
I want to see
the signs and the
deep, precise wisdom
of the true ones –
ancestors, elders, any and all
trying to inform us that
there is a way -
there is a way
to heal,
there is a way
to see,
there is a way
to change direction,
there is a way
to give the children
what they need
to be safe
to be listening
to be healthy
to be whole.
I, too,
want to be whole
all the way into
death and, yes,
I’ll say it,
beyond death,
beyond it but not beyond
the cycle of being -
the ring, the hoop of
being together.
This is the place where
Love remains, where
Love sustains, where
Love comes
into and through
all things.
Love is spirit
flowing into the life
of the world.
Knowing this
I am left with a question
to pose to myself:
What would an
indigenous grandmother do?
- Maya Spector
A different format using my typography and design, the image is modified from an unattributed Pinterest post.
Angels
This is how an angel comes
out of the earth, upwards
from the underworld
when everybody thought
they came from the light wings
of the sky - no
they are massive -
on nights of rain and sleet, split
the soil, splash and muddy the grass
wingspans wide as lakes
wearing mud armour, they crawl
full length up rivers and streams
dam ditches, seep through drains
penetrate walls, barns, chicken coops
unsettle bats with wing-beats
that shake down trees -
remind us, cradled in our prayers
how we like to remain dry, sheltered.
This is how angels come
mouths full of earth
spitting verses
of poetry.
- Miriam Darlington
Wood and Steel
first day at sea
The steel deck hums
Rolling ocean bringing back dreams
Of wooden ships and creaking ropes
Wood once home to squirrel and bird
Roots knowing darkness and moisture
This steel ship knows no life
But for the guest in my cabin
A ladybug has stowed away with me
I place her in the steel drawer
Of the steel desk
On the steel ship
I bring her water
And bits of food
This ambassador of all living things
Trapped in a cold steel world
That bug, a living icon
Impossibly red with magic black spots
I fell in love with her
And all creation at the same time
But she did not survive
Heartbroken in mid-Atlantic
A burial at sea
Inside a matchbox coffin
The only wood I could find
- Brian Narelle
The Night She Danced
A smoky basement in Seville,
cigar plumes hanging low,
a single bulb
with a bent green shade
lights it all.
Underneath the singer’s bleeding voice
an ancient rhythm throbbed
from an old guitar and there
on the bottom step,
something leaned
against the wall.
It was then Delilia stood up
on the pitted mahogany floor,
and danced the whole history of Andalusia
out of the night and into the room.
All those times of exquisite pain
and painful joy.
Like the night the grandmother died
and the grandchild was born in Favencia.
And that year that the Guadalimar
leaped from it’s banks and carried away
the lemon orchard and the mule.
And the time the bull with the broken horn
crashed through Alejandro’s bodega
just before siesta.
And the time the wine turned to vinegar.
And the Christmas mass when the priest died.
It was all there.
The winter shawl made by Maria Helena
for the statue of Our Lady.
And the perfect olives grown by Tio Miguel
on his dry and scorched huerto.
The music caught it all in a flaming cauldron
of blazing heels and chattering castanets.
Delilia, consumed by Duende, was danced
by the joy the sorrow, the pleasure the pain,
the sugar the lemon, the life and the death,
the laugh and the scream. The pain and the fire.
Nothing escaped that pulsing dance.
We could all die! Santo Padre! Death is near!
Then a sudden dark silence
caught it all by the throat.
Madre de dios! What had she done?
Delilia’s last step
had smashed it all
without remorse.
Death was there that night
slinking nearer the singer’s heart
but Death left the basement
with empty arms.
No match for the Duende in the room
the night Della danced flamenco.
- Doug von Koss
Wonderful poem, Larry. Here's a similar one from R. M. Rilke, translated by C. F. MacIntyre:
SPANISH DANCER
As in the hand a match glows, swiftly white
before it bursts in flame and to all sides
licks its quivering tongues: within the ring
of spectators her wheeling dance is bright,
nimble, and fervid, twitches and grows wide.
And suddenly is made of pure fire.
Now her glances kindle the dark hair;
she twirls the floating skirts with daring art
into a whirlwind of consuming flame,
from which her naked arms alertly strike,
clattering like fearful rattlesnakes.
Then, as the fire presses her too closely,
imperiously she clutches it and throws it
with haughty gestures to the floor and watches
it rage and leap with flames that will not die--
until, victorious, surely, with a sweet
greeting smile, and holding her head high,
she tramples it to death with small, firm feet.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Berryman
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
- W.S. Merwin
Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space
May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss
May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away
May you integrate the wisdoms of your passage
May you feel the sacred burden of your own life in your arms
May you treat yourself with exquisite kindness and patience
May you find peace in your cocoon . . . acceptance and surrender
May you be transformed by your own darkness and rise renewed
- Kay Crista
TheSoldiers In The Garden
After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda’s garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.
The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.
For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the solders
vanish from the garden.
- Martín Espada
Touch the Air Softly
Now touch the air softly, step gently, one, two ...
I'll love you 'til roses are robin's egg blue;
I'll love you 'til gravel is eaten for bread,
And lemons are orange, and lavender's red.
Now touch the air softly, swing gently the broom.
I'll love you 'til windows are all of a room;
And the table is laid, And the table is bare,
And the ceiling reposes on bottomless air.
I'll love you 'til heaven rips the stars from his coat,
And the moon rows away in a glass-bottomed boat;
And Orion steps down like a river below,
And earth is ablaze, and oceans aglow.
So touch the air softly, and swing the broom high.
We will dust the grey mountains, and sweep the blue sky:
And I'll love you as long as the furrow the plough,
As however is ever, and ever is now.
- William Jay Smith
The New Song
For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
- W.S.Merwin
The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive
- N. Scott Momaday
Quarantine, 1918
There were towns
that knew about the flu before
it arrived; they had time to imagine the germs
on a stranger’s skirts, to see how death
could be sealed in an envelope,
how a fever could bloom in the evening,
and take a life overnight.
A few villages, deep in the mountains,
posted guards on their roads,
and no one was allowed to come or go,
not even a grandmother carrying a cake;
no mail was accepted and all the words
and packages families sent
to one another went unopened,
unanswered. Trains were told
not to stop, so they glowed for a moment
before swaying
towards some other place. The food
at the corner store never came
from out of town and no one went
to see a distant auntie
or state fair. For awhile, the outside world
existed in imagination, in memory,
in books or suitcases, deep in closets.
There was nothing but the town itself,
hiding from what was possible,
and the children cutting dolls
from paper, their scissors sharp.
- Faith Shearin
Storm
rain drops strike
batter black wood
spark leap collapse
mirrors of sky
cypher of lights
a deluge
in intricate wild
steps of rain
the wind takes rest
in bright glass
quieting pools
dimple daintily
sinews of clouds
open the sky to view
but soon the storm curls
this corner room a friend
beating and gusting
these windows now
- Kevin Pryne
Bedtime
We are a meadow where the bees hum,
mind and body are almost one
as the fire snaps in the stove
and our eyes close,
and mouth to mouth, the covers
pulled over our shoulders,
we drowse as horses drowse afield,
in accord; though the fall cold
surrounds our warm bed, and though
by day we are singular and often lonely.
- Denise Levertov
Lines for Winter
Tell yourself
as it get cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you found yourself -
inside the dome of dark
or under the crackling white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tunes your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
- Mark Strand
The man pictured has terminal lung cancer, he quit smoking 15 years ago but had no chest x-rays during that period, when he did —it was too late.
I'll send him Mark Strand's poem "Lines for Winter", now illustrated with his image.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Traveling Through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already; almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason --
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
- William Stafford
The Powwow at the End of the World
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.
- Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie for Poet Laureate of America!
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
I second that!Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:
Janet
The Healing Time
Finally on my way to yes
I bumped into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy
- Pesha Gertler
Tending the Sedge
The land was first the land’s. Then, the Pomo,
the Miwok and the Wappo lived on it.
The tribelets of the Konohomtara,
the Kataictemi and the Biakomtara
settled on different sections of the wide
Laguna for over 10,000 years.
Little changed except the roots and stalks of
the coarse sedge plants that grew half-submerged in
the water. The Pomo basket weavers
cultivated the sedge fields, passed prayers
for straight stalks and supple roots from mouth to
ear to mouth. Prayed and sang, untangled and threaded.
The basket is in the roots, that’s where it begins.
- Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Listening To The Republicans
Winter 2016
I don’t want
to be inspired
I don’t need
to be uplifted
I want
to descend
to walk down
to where their pain is,
to where fear,
like a
week-old
rotting corpse,
has absolutely
nothing good to say
I want to listen
to the stench
to the terror
so that when I return
I can keep my heart
open,
so that I
can remember
where
and what
they were
taught.
- Trout Black
Wild Common Prayer
I dreamt you were whole again, radiant, calm: your hair still golden but
tinged with red — a halo of rosy, burnished light — and your hands
untrembling in your lap. I was surprised to find you home. But I’ve been here
all along, you said. Or might have said. You didn’t speak. You’d only aged
as women age whose bodies ease them toward death; grown softer, more
yourself. And I was the one who stood amazed, there in the kitchen where
we’d spent so many quiet mornings, friend. Wanting to touch you, wanting
to simply not forsake you now. Outside, the pasture lay down calmly; each
blade shimmered in the wind. This is eternity, I thought, and felt you breaking
into all your lovely fragments as I woke.
- Cecilia Woloch
Of the Color Blue
First in the stark relief
of black and white,
the day emerges through the cottonwoods.
Know the likelihood of that blue
that’s been called headstrong.
It’s the same one
that can represent the distance,
that can awaken the optimist within,
speaking in one of its assorted voices.
Listen carefully while assembling one’s self,
while choosing which mask to put on,
or to leave off.
Today’s reality show will attempt
to make you the star,
competing agendas will clamor
for attention,
for center stage.
Hold tight to your heart center,
to your own firm resolve.
It is your circus,
and your choice of participating simians.
- Pamela Williams
Poem In Which My Legs Are Accepted
Legs!
How we have suffered each other,
never meeting the standard of magazines
or official measurements.
I have hung you from trapezes,
sat you on wooden rollers,
pulled and pushed you
with the anxiety of taffy,
and still you are yourselves!
Most obvious imperfection, blight on my fantasy life,
strong,
plump,
never to be skinny
or even hinting of the svelte beauties in history books
or Sears catalogues.
Here you are -- solid, fleshy and
white as when I first noticed you, sitting on the toilet,
spread softly over the wooden seat,
having been with me only twelve years,
yet
as obvious as the legs of my thirty-year-old gym teacher.
Legs!
O that was the year we did acrobatics in the annual gym show.
How you split for me!
One-handed cartwheels
from this end of the gymnasium to the other,
ending in double splits,
legs you flashed in blue rayon slacks my mother bought
for the occasion
and tho you were confidently swinging along,
the rest of me blushed at the sound of clapping.
Legs!
How I have worried about you, not able to hide you,
embarrassed at beaches, in highschool
when the cheerleaders' slim brown legs
spread all over
the sand
with the perfection
of bamboo.
I hated you, and still you have never given out on me.
With you
I have risen to the top of blue waves,
with you
I have carried food home as a loving gift
when my arms began un-
jelling like madrilenne.
Legs, you are a pillow,
white and plentiful with feathers for his wild head.
You are the endless scenery
behind the tense sinewy elegance of his two dark legs.
You welcome him joyfully
and dance.
And you will be the locks in a new canal between continents.
The ship of life will push out of you
and rejoice
in the whiteness,
in the first floating and rising of water.
- Kathleen Fraser
Marrying God
Dark of the moon making
Ritual my own, stone altar
My fire, low and quieted
The incessant tide insists
I hear its rhythmic chant
Above the scratching sound
My own voice attempts
To remember words that
Call forth a Power, protection.
I am asking for answers
Requesting questions.
Ritual to heal the hearts
I have broken—my own,
My daughter's, her fathers.
Is it right this joy surrounding
The molten center of grief?
As I sing, resurrecting hymns
Of a childhood of certainty
A God of consequence and presence,
Another presence presents,
A shadow rushes past, so close
I feel its wake. This obscure shade
Mine? His rage? A stranger
Come to make the beach
A bed for the night?
My fire doused, I climb the cliff,
Feel foolish, but certain
Rituals of my own always
Leave me chagrined, find me
Later rewarded. Weeks later
Full sun, I return, armed
With incense and photos—my
Father, his father, hoping to find
A balm, a cure for this crack
In my soul's center, wound inflicted
By life that makes men
Other, condemns us to struggle.
Moonless night, firelight
Now passed. Atop ashes a ring
Wedding ring. Mine now
I wed an uncertain god,
One who promises nothing
Gives all. With this ring
Relic of another's broken
Heart, released to the ocean
Returned to the shore,
I thee wed.
- Rebecca del Rio
Spiritual Chickens
A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room.
If he could only see them!
Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder.
At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly.
The man is in the process of picking his teeth.
Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens.
The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes through her.
He calls in his wife but she can see nothing.
This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her.
How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream?
The man grows afraid.
He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure.
Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head.
Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy.
Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen.
Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table.
Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself.
Even the nervous man has disappeared.
If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it.
She would grow vain, egotistical, she would look for someone to fight, but being a chicken she can just enjoy it and make little squawks, silent to all except the man who ate her, who is far off banging his head against a wall like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel, making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in or nothing of value falls out.
How happy he would have been to be born a chicken, to be of good use to his fellow creatures and rich in companionship after death.
As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head - why surrender his corner on the truth? - better just to go crazy.
- Stephen Dobyns