Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

A Buddhist Grace
or What’s Wrong With This Picture?


Somehow I never make it through this prayer:


Potatoes, celery, carrots, onions,
each tenderly coaxed
from soft soil aerated by your hand.
Thank you farmer for your work,
I am connected to you
through this fine stew
unified by its good red burgundy stock.
Thank you vintners and wine makers
for your part in this symphony
conducted with the tang of a bay leaf.


Let’s see—allow me to consider what else
for which to be thankful in my
deep dish of pungent stew—
—ah the succulence of fall-apart beef
nurtured to morseled chunks by your hand,
my cook, my uniter of all components.


Thank you cattle for offering yourselves as sacrifice.
Thank you slaughterhouse workers
wading ankle-deep in blood.
Thank you, those of you with the courage
to impersonally slay.
Thank you to the packers hanging carcasses on hooks.
Thank you for the cutters
who hew beef bodies
as if they were so many grades
and cuts of lumber.
Thank you, all of you, for the intimate part
you play in my meal and my life this day.


- Ed Coletti

Interesting poem! Just parenthetically and a bit synchronistically, my wife is currently reading MY YEAR OF MEATS by Ruth Ozeki, a zen teacher as well as author of several novels. This one is about a documentary film-maker's experience of the beef industry in America.

One of my all-time favorite books--hilarious, poignant, fantastical and real.
kathy

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:

Interesting poem! Just parenthetically and a bit synchronistically, my wife is currently reading MY YEAR OF MEATS by Ruth Ozeki, a zen teacher as well as author of several novels. This one is about a documentary film-maker's experience of the beef industry in America.

---

I Was Just Reading A Beautiful Book of Poetry


and I glanced down
at my hand holding that book
and my hand—
it had to have been my hand
because I was the only one there
and I was the one holding the book--
my hand was all ripply
with wrinkles.


Not just a few wrinkles—
dozens, hundreds of wrinkles
more wrinkles than one would imagine
could even fit on a hand
and not even a whole hand
no, just the space between wrist
and thumb that was holding the book
of poems in my hand
the beautiful book of beautiful poems
by Fran Claggett
the beautiful wrinkled old poet
on the cover.


- Lilith Rogers

Pay Heed to the Magic


Don’t confuse it with illusion

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...1_14-39-02.png

magicians’ mischief
the sleight-of-hand that splays the deck of cards
& begs you choose
won’t listen to your longing.


Peer under leaves instead
in early morning light
still drunk with dew.
Trace the snail’s trail
with your finger;
see where it goes.


Catch the eyes of elders
eyes that laugh when mouths turn down
in spite of themselves.
They have seen the magic.
Pay heed to wild mushrooms
springing from a fairy ring.


The world’s alive with synchronicity
there for the taking.
Take what you need
or what you love.
Leave breathless.


- Sandra Anfang

Belle Isle, 1949

We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I’d never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from. - Phillip Levine

From A Window

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

- Christian Wiman

Terza Rima


In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can't be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell


How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,


And then flew on, as if towards Paradise.


- Richard Wilbur

Song of a Second April


April, this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again and butterflies.


There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey woodpecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.


The larger streams run still and deep,
Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun,
Pensively -- only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.


- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Second Life


My uncourageous life
doesn’t want to go,
doesn’t want to speak,
doesn’t want to carry on,
wants to make its way
through stealth,
wants to assume
the strange and dubious honor
of not being heard.
My uncourageous life
doesn’t want to move
doesn’t even want to stir,
wants to inhabit
a difficult form
of stillness,
to pull everything
into the silence
where the throat strains
but gives no voice.
My uncourageous life
wants to stop
the whole world
and keep it stopped
not only for itself
but for everyone
and everything it knows,
refusing to stir even a single inch
until given an exact
and final destination.
This uncourageous
second life wants to win
some undeserved lottery
so that it can finally
bestow a just and final
reward upon itself.
No, this second life
never wants to write
or speak, or cook
or set the table
or welcome guests
or sit up talking
with a stranger
who might accidentally
set us traveling again.
This second life
doesn’t want
to leave the door,
doesn’t want
to take any path
that works its own
sweet way
through mountains,
doesn’t want
to follow
the beckoning flow
of a distant river
nor meet
the chance weather
where a pass
takes us
from one discovered
world
to another.
This second life
just wants to lie down;
close its eyes
and tell God
it has a headache.
But my other life
my first life,
the life I admire
and want to follow
looks on and listens
with some wonder,
and even extends
a reassuring hand
for the one holding back,
knowing there can be
no real confrontation
without the need
to turn away
and go back
away from it all,
to have things
be different,
and to close our eyes
until they
are different.
No,
this hidden life,
this first courageous life,
seems to speak
from silence
and in the language
of a knowing,
beautiful heartbreak,
above all
it seems to know
well enough
it will have
to give back
everything received
in any form
and even, sometimes,
as it tells the story
of the way ahead,
laughs out loud
in the knowledge.
This first life seems
sure and steadfast
in knowing
it will come across
the help it needs
at every crucial place
and thus continually
sharpens my sense
of impending
revelation.
This first
courageous life
in fact, has already
gone ahead
has nowhere to go
except
out the door
into the clear air
of morning
taking me with it,
nothing to do
except to breathe
while it can,
no way to travel
but with that familiar
pilgrim
movement in the body,
nothing to teach except
to show me
on the long road
how we sometimes
like to walk alone,
open to the silent revelation,
and then stop and gather
and share everything
as dark comes in,
telling the story
of a day’s accidental
beauty.
And perhaps
most intriguingly
and most poignantly
and most fearfully of all
and at the very end
of the long road
it has travelled,
it wants to take me
to a high place
from which to see,
with a view looking back
on the way we took
to get there,
so it can have me
understand myself
as witness
and thus
bequeath me
the way ahead,
so it can teach me
how to invent
my own disappearance
so it can lie down at the end
and show me,
even against my will,
how to undo myself,
how to surpass myself:
how to find
a way
to die
of generosity.
- David Whyte

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.


Catastrophe? It's just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.


Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.


All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.


- Gregory Orr

Apocalypse


We took what we could before the storm came.
We were still speaking then, our words kinder –
what to pack and how to leave this house behind,
what about the computers and some clothes,
a few toys for the kids, and
who would drive?


I remember the last look at the living room -
its majestic fireplace, blonde wood mantle
industrial bolts at each end, the alpine ceiling,
eastward view of the mountain range.
From the picture window, we saw the escalating chaos,
plumes of smoke and hungry wild eyes.


We moved from side to side
frantic for pockets of air that would save us.
But we were left without breath,
no way to rebuild
even when the ashes cooled.


What did we know of the coming destruction?
We took what we could.
Why did we leave the children behind?


- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

The Wren of the Heart

In the fragile and crystalline beauty of the sweet summer morning
The wren of the heart becomes visible.
All that soft hopefulness that the world crushes
Is unveiled briefly.

What we have wanted and wished
With childlike simplicity
Flies out towards the simplicity
Of the vulnerable early day.

In that moment of silence
The song of yearning
Sings its single sweet note.

- Jean Norelli

Dear you: the lights here ask nothing, the white falling around my letters silent, unstoppable. I am writing this from the empty stomach of sleep where nothing but the cold wonders where you’re headed; nobody here peels heads sour and cheap as lemon, and only the car sings AM the whole night through. In the city, I have seen children half- bitten by wind. Even trains arrive without a soul to greet them; things do not need me here, this world dances on its own. Only bridges beg for me to make them famous, to learn what I had almost forgotten of flying, of soaring free, south, down. So long. Xs, Os.

- Kevin Young

Applying for a poetic license The line was surprisingly long The wait - nerve wracking List credentials: Classes, check Workshops, check MFA, check Conferences, check Long dark night of the soul, check Fill in: Quote the masters Fill in: quote the hacks And don’t do that. Ever. Multiple choice: How many coffee spoons would you need To measure your life? How big was your yawp For how many hours did you race naked screaming Down the foggy hills of San Francisco? Extra credit: Bad childhood? Lonely marriage? Did you get it all, the man behind me asked. All, I replied but at the front of the line The sign clicked over Like an old clock, new numbers The fee changed again & Today, too high For what remains In my account.

- Catherine Bramkamp

Passover


Tell me: how is this night different

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...2_13-30-54.png

From all other nights?
How, tell me, is this Passover
Different from other Passovers?
Light the lamp, open the door wide
So the pilgrim can come in,
Gentile or Jew;
Under the rags perhaps the prophet is concealed.
Let him enter and sit down with us;
Let him listen, drink, sing and celebrate Passover;
Let him consume the bread of affliction,
The Paschal Lamb, sweet mortar and bitter herbs.
This is the night of differences
In which you lean your elbow on the table,
Since the forbidden becomes prescribed,
Evil is translated into good.

We will spend the night recounting
Far-off events full of wonder,
And because of all the wine
The mountains will skip like rams.
Tonight they exchange questions:
The wise, the godless, the simple-minded and the child.
And time reverses its course,
Today flowing back into yesterday,
Like a river enclosed at its mouth.
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Soaked straw and clay with sweat,
And crossed the sea dry-footed.
You too, stranger.
This year in fear and shame,
Next year in virtue and in justice.

- Primo Levi

Passover Remembered

Pack nothing.
Bring only your determination to serve
and your willingness to be free.

Don't wait for the bread to ride.
Take nourishment for the journey,
but eat standing,
be ready to move at a moment's notice.

Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind - fear, silence, submission.

Only surrender to the need of the time;
to love justice and walk humbly with your God.

Do not take time to explain to the neighbors.
Tell only a few trusted friends and family members.

Then begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into the old ways.

Set out in the dark.
I will send fire to warm and encourage you.
I will be with you in the fire
and I will be with you in the cloud.

You will learn to eat new food and find refuge in new places.
I will give you dreams in the desert
to guide you safely home to that place
you have not yet seen.

The stories you will tell one another around the fires in the dark
will make you strong and wise.

Outsiders will attack you and some who follow you,
and at times you will get weary
and turn on each other
from fear and fatigue and blind forgetfulness.

You have been preparing for this for hundreds of years.
I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way
And to learn my ways more deeply.

Some of you will be so changed
by weathers and wanderings
that even your closest friends
will have to learn your features
as though for the first time.
Some of you will not change at all.

Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves
and misunderstood by those
who have known you since birth
and feel abandoned by you.

Some will find new friendship
in unlikely faces, and old friends
as faithful, and true
as the pillar of God's flame.

Sing songs as you go,
and hold close together.
You may at times grow confused
and lose your way.

Continue to call each other
By the names I’ve given you,
To help you remember who you are.
Touch each other and keep telling the stories.

Make maps as you go,
remembering the way back
from before you were born.

So you will be only the first
of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas.
It is the first of many beginnings
your Paschaltide.
Remain true to this mystery.

Pass on the whole story.

Do not go back.

I am with you now
and I am waiting for you.

- Alla Renee Bozarth

A perfect poem for these very difficult times.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Passover Remembered

...

---

Our Mother


Our Mother who here is,
holy be all your names,
here be your reign,
your will is done,
heaven takes care of itself.
Give us our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses
a while longer until we learn
not to trespass against one another.
We make our own temptations
and only we can free ourselves from evil.
For yours is the reign,
the power, and the glory
for as long we exist to praise you.
Amen.

- Rafael Jesús González


Madre Nuestra

Madre nuestra que aquí eres,
santos sean todos tus nombres,
aquí es tu reino,
se hace tu voluntad,
el cielo se cuida de si mismo.
Danos nuestro pan de cada día,
y perdona nuestras ofensas
un rato más hasta que aprendamos
a no ofendernos unos a los otros.
Hacemos nuestras propias tentaciones
y sólo nosotros podremos librarnos del mal.
Pues tuyo es el reino,
y el poder y la gloria
por cuanto existamos para alabarte.
Amén.

- Rafael Jesús González

Dover Beach


The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full,
the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;
on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean,
and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full,
and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


- Matthew Arnold

Eagle Feather Fan
The eagle is my power,
And my fan is an eagle.
It is strong and beautiful
In my hand. And it is real.
My fingers hold upon it
As if the beaded handle
Were the twist of bristlecone.
The bones of my hand are fine
And hollow; the fan bears them.
My hand veers in the thin air
Of the summits. All morning
It scuds on the cold currents;
All afternoon it circles
To the singing, to the drums.


- N. Scott Momaday

Government
Standing next to my old friend
I sense that his soldiers have retreated.
And mine?
They're resting their guns on their shoulders,
Talking quietly.
"I'm hungry," one says.
"Cheeseburger," says another.
And they all decide to go and find some dinner.
But the next day,
negotiating the too narrow aisles at the Health and Harmony Food Store,
when I say, "Excuse me" to the woman and her cart of organic chicken
and green grapes,
she pulls her cart not quite far back enough for me to pass,
and a small mob in me begins to pick up the fruit to throw.
So many kingdoms, and in each kingdom
So many people:
The disinherited son, the corrupt counselor, the courtesan, the fool.
And so many gods arguing among themselves over toast,
through the lunch salad,
and on into the long hours of the mild spring afternoon.
"I'm the god."
"No, I'm the god."
"No, I'm the god!"
I can hardly hear myself over their muttering.
How can I discipline my army?
They're exhausted and want more money.
How can I disarm when my enemies seem so intent?
- Marie Howe

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...8_09-40-10.png

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the
Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly
accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his
freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.




III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.


In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;


Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.


Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;


With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;


In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.


- W. H. Auden

Yeats and Auden - - two of the truly greats.

Hawks

Surely, you too have longed for this --

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...9_12-17-06.png

to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it --
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.

- Lynn Ungar

Buddha's Dogs


I'm at a day-long meditation retreat, eight hours of watching

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...0_13-39-00.png

my mind with my mind,
and I already fell asleep twice and nearly fell out of my chair,
and it's not even noon yet.

In the morning session, I learned to count my thoughts, ten in
one minute, and the longest
was to leave and go to San Anselmo and shop, then find an
outdoor cafe and order a glass

of Sancerre, smoked trout with roasted potatoes and baby
carrots and a bowl of gazpacho.
But I stayed and learned to name my thoughts, so far they are:
wanting, wanting, wanting,

wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting, judgment,
sadness. Don't identify with your
thoughts, the teacher says, you are not your personality, not your
ego-identification,

then he bangs the gong for lunch. Whoever, whatever I am is
given instruction
in the walking meditation and the eating meditation and walks
outside with the other

meditators, and we wobble across the lake like The Night of the
Living Dead.
I meditate slowly, falling over a few times because I kept my
foot in the air too long,

towards a bench, sit slowly down, and slowly eat my sandwich,
noticing the bread,
(sourdough), noticing the taste, (tuna, sourdough), noticing
the smell, (sourdough, tuna),

thanking the sourdough, the tuna, the ocean, the boat, the
fisherman, the field, the grain,
the farmer, the Saran Wrap that kept this food fresh for this
body made of food and desire

and the hope of getting through the rest of this day without
dying of boredom.
Sun then cloud then sun. I notice a maple leaf on my sandwich.
It seems awfully large.

Slowly brushing it away, I feel so sad I can hardly stand it, so I
name my thoughts; they are:
sadness about my mother, judgment about my father, wanting
the child I never had.

I notice I've been chasing the same thoughts like dogs around
the same park most of my life,
notice the leaf tumbling gold to the grass. The gong sounds,
and back in the hall.

I decide to try lying down meditation, and let myself sleep. The
Buddha in my dream is me,
surrounded by dogs wagging their tails, licking my hands.
I wake up

for the forgiveness meditation, the teacher saying, never put
anyone out of your heart,
and the heart opens and knows it won't last and will have to
open again and again,

chasing those dogs around and around in the sun then cloud
then sun.


- Susan Browne

Surrealist May Day 1984

The workers of the world have united only in going to work, like on any other day when the steelworkers are poured into vats of molten iron, the chemical workers are poisoned, and the auto workers are run over; but outdoors the air breathes the throb of spring's pulse.

People who have not been out all winter have doffed their heavy clothing and carry banners in the street saying, 'Kindness, Please', silent hordes who have never spoken their hearts.

Eagles drop good luck amulets all over the city from their talons. Sitting on a park bench, I try to follow out the lines of my palm into the future, but keep winding up in fog.

There's another parade from the opposite side of town, a parade of heavy-breasted mothers chanting, 'We did our best! ' But following them are dwarves with crystal balls imploring them to search their hearts more deeply.

Orangutans in tuxedos dine at the best restaurants in town, worship at chic liberal chapels, and drive cars on obsessed trails like vicious bloodhounds in order to make dentists' appointments on time.

Hoboes are waking in the parks, beginning to walk. By the time they reach the classiest hotels, they too are magically dressed in tuxedos, and tap-dance in the lobbies. In comes a singing waiter with free horseduerves, crooning in a voice like Caruso, 'After this, you're on your own.'

A conference of Surrealist painters is going to City Hall to confess that they never meant anything by their symbolism. They have voted to ask to be put in jail.

Elvis Presley and James Dean types have run out of cigarettes in their t-shirt sleeves, gotten nervous, and gone to the Neurology floor of the Hospital to see if maybe an operation could make them like everybody else.

From beyond the sea comes an invasion of the Armies of Compassion, about to disembark from their troop carriers on the river, bearing cannons of Love. Their waving banners read, 'Everybody is a Prophet' and 'Flowers Are Banners, Too'. They have wise smiles and deep eyes, and their onrush promises to radically alter the situation.


- Max Reif

Salt
for my 5^th great-grandmother, buried at sea in 1755, first name unknown

I imagine cormorants, black against rinsed sky, fog
a second skin, your hands on the ship's slick rail to steady
yourself against the tide that day you fled. I imagine

your leave-taking, rough unpainted door, hedgerow
of hawthorn in bud, blue song-thrush eggs safe in their nest,
left behind with your idle loom. Ulster's kings of commerce

no longer trade in linen, raised the rent, pressed your life to the margins.
Your family can only imagine freedom and plenty somewhere that is not home.
A rough migration along the curve of the earth leaves the Irish Sea behind,

your ears filled with wind, heaven past the horizon, just out of reach.
I imagine ingots of light igniting the waves as smallpox ignites
your cheeks, your fevered dreams of home, the hawthorn buds, open,

their honeyed scent, a thrush's fluting song, while on this ship,
three children, John, Jacob, Sarah, clutch their father's homespun shirt,
bereft. I imagine a life, a death, your memory a whisper,

nameless. No shroud save your linen apron. No Memento mori
on lichened stone. The salt of fever and tears joins all the unnamed
beneath the waves, your life just so much salt in the wound of the world.


- Susan Lamont

The Gods of the Millennium


The god of expectations made money like mad, made money like
butter in a churn, poured it out like butter over popcorn,
on the deserving and covetous alike. The god of expectations was
blessed and applauded.

And that was a good year.
The god of approximations made the kingdom almost come.
Granted, There were brush wars, small wars, minor contusions on
the world map. There were bombings on high and sanctions
against expendable children and a general mood of discontent
and 'Get the bustards'.

But still, by and large the sanctuaries were full and the
preachers preached and the collections came in and the
authorities sat straight in the front pews of the national
cathedral. The president entered the bully pulpit to intone an
infallible irrefutable doctrine of bloody tit for tat.

And that was a good year.
The god of contemplation made humans spin like spinning prayer
wheels. Seated on a bed of gold, like a lotus in its native
element, he intoned; you think therefore you are. Think, think.

So they thought and thought and they were and were.
And that was a good year.

The god of Christians staggered up a hill, dragging a plank of
wood heavy as a plowshare. Like a plowshare the plank made a
furrow; from the furrow sprang armed warriors, redundant lives,
talking skulls, disconsolate dragons, teeth on edge, followed
by a multitude of martyrs, clothed in their blood. A girl
named Cassandra brought up the rear, raving into the wind.

That procession? It was of small moment and went all but
unnoticed.

Except for this; with regard to money, war, bully pulpits and
prayer wheels - that was a very bad year.


- Daniel Berrigan
1922-2016

The Power of the Crone


She enacts and teaches the truth —
embracing the blessing of limitation
she accepts Life’s new gift of freedom,
she discovers her power to choose,
to say a Positive No to the things
she doesn’t want to do —

She focuses on what matters most
in her life, letting go
of the excesses that drain her energies,
she practices tender loving detachment
as she discerns or confirms

Where Home Is
Where She Belongs
What Her Heart’s Desire Is
And What She Cherishes Most

and embraces them
and herself
to the Full.

- Alla Renee Bozarth

Memory

Climbing through a dark shower
I came to the edge of the mountain

I was a child
and everything was there

the flight of eagles the passage of warriors
watching the valley far below

the wind on the cliff the cold rain blowing upward
from the rock face

everything around me had burned
and I was coming back

walking on charcoal among the low green bushes
wet to the skin and wide awake


- W.S. Merwyn

On Another's Sorrow


Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear --

And not sit beside the next,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
Oh no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give his joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

Oh He gives to us his joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.

- William Blake

I’m Listening


I'm listening. But I don't know
If what I hear is silence or God.
I'm listening. But I can't tell
If I hear the plane of emptiness echoing
Or a keen consciousness
That at the bounds of the universe
Deciphers and watches me.
I only know I walk like someone
Beheld, Beloved and Known.
And because of this
I put into my every movement
Solemnity and Risk.

- Sophia DeMello-Breyner

wow, so much said in so few words!

Looking for Mother


He stands among the white painted racks –
An older man who could be any woman's son.
He is looking for mother in the words and phrases
Penned on the inside of each greeting card.
She is not there.

I wonder – will this be my son
When his time comes to choose?
Will he find me among the Hallmark deities,
Second only to Mary or Mother Teresa?

From what palette of memories
Will he paint my portrait?
Will it be the goodnight hugs, sweet moments of tenderness,
Or sometimes, tears of despair?

Will he select, as this man does,
The blank page on which to write?
Will he remember that I had my own life,
And mother was only one of my names?

- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Kaddish for My Mother


Sarah Sarah shtetl child
of peddler Sholem, sheytled Mintzi,
you bore the griefs of history to Brooklyn,
hungry for the taste of liberation
in the cage of a tenement
where you sang your exiled songs.

Sarah of dark curls and heart-shaped face,
what a beauty you were, girl of seventeen
smiling under April blossom trees
with Sam, namesake of your father;
in you he saw the Medina's promised gold.

The litany of your three day labor,
your apocalyptic screams
while Bubbe Sonia muttered in his ear
bad luck to kiss before a birth.

His male hesitation
his fear of uncleanness
The kiss too late.

I was yours, Mother.

Friday sundowns you lit the Sabbath candles,
chanted the prayers with covered head,
cupped fingers beseeching the flame
while I gazed speechless
aching with the sudden beauty that lit the kitchen
to a temple.

Bungalow summers, blackberry picking days,
nights when I lay my head in your lap
feeling your heart beat, your blood flow,
as you sang with the women Yiddish songs
of struggle and yearning.

I'm older now than you would ever be;
sickness stopped your May Day marches
stilled your voice,
stilled your mind.

Sleep now, bride, in the final bed.
Now you are one with your dreams,
perfect, your cells in cosmic silence,
clear and light, an open channel
for the simple forms of nature to pass through
and claim you as their own.

My daughter sings your songs,
keeps the funny dolls you made
with shaky button eyes,
and I, I keep a rain-cap,
travel-kit, gifts you gave,
good for one on a journey.
You knew.

I journeyed to your grave again
sat in the quiet of earth and stones
saw a sparrow land
where you lie as if flying
from the blossom trees of Brooklyn.

- Mara Levine

The Pact


It was broken before
We arrived, the pact with
Life. Shattered like crystal
Heaved in fearful fury. All our
Lives, we walk across
The sparkling glass
Bleeding out breathing
In the agony of Ages.


How could we know
We came as witnesses?
Our job to see beyond
Even our own cynicism
The pessimism inherited
From millennia and millions.


Our work
Immerse in mourning
Inhale distilled sorrow
Become an alchemist
Convert loss into love.


- Rebecca del Rio

Leave Me Hidden

I was having trouble deciding
which to watch: Night
of the Living Bloggers, or
Attack of the Neck-Brace People.
In the end I just went for a walk.

In the woods I stopped wondering why
of all trees
this one: my hand
pressed to fissures
and ridges of

bark’s hugely magnified
fingerprint, forehead
resting against it
finally, feeling
distinctly

a heartbeat, vast, silently
booming there deep in
my hidden leaves, blessed
motherworld, personal
underworld, thank you

thank you.

- Franz Wright

The Stream of Enough


After decades of meandering hither and yon,
like a sleep-deprived pilot with neither destination nor flight plan,
attaching tentatively wherever I landed,
as you learn to do when you grow up with your bags packed,
searching for more,
yearning for more,
sometimes strategically, sometimes artfully,
mostly haphazardly,
I wandered awhile back, almost by chance, into contentment.

I feel settled now,
remembering afresh the sweet dreaminess of being four,
lying on the grass, idling timelessly,
nothing to do, nowhere to go,
staring happily at white clouds floating in a Pennsylvania blue sky,
rowing my mental boat gently down an untroubled stream
for which I have, at long last, found a name:
enough!

- Bill Dickinson

Care

My 16-month old daughter wakes from her nap and cries. I pick her up, press her against my chest and rub her back until my palm warms like an old family quilt. “Daddy’s here, daddy’s here,” I whisper. Here is the island of Oʻahu, 8,500 miles from Syria. But what if Pacific trade winds suddenly became helicopters? Flames, nails, and shrapnel indiscriminately barreling towards us? What if shadows cast against our windows aren’t plumeria tree branches, but soldiers and terrorists marching in heat? Would we reach the desperate boats of the Mediterranean in time? If we did, could I straighten my legs into a mast, balanced against the pull and drift of the current? “Daddy’s here, daddy’s here,” I whisper. But am I strong enough to carry her across the razor wires of sovereign borders and ethnic hatred? Am I strong enough to plead: “please, help us, please, just let us pass, please, we aren’t suicide bombs.” Am I strong enough to keep walking even after my feet crack like Halaby pepper fields after five years of drought, after this drought of humanity. Trains and buses rock back and forth to detention centers. Yet what if we didn’t make landfall? What if here capsized? Could you inflate your body into a buoy to hold your child above rising waters? “Daddy’s here, daddy’s here,” I whisper. Drowning is the last lullaby of the sea. I lay my daughter onto bed, her breath finally as calm as low tide. To all the parents who brave the crossing: you and your children matter. I hope your love will teach the nations that emit the most carbon and violence that they should, instead, remit the most compassion. I hope, soon, the only difference between a legal refugee and an illegal migrant will be how willing we are to open our homes, offer refuge, and carry each other towards the horizon of care. - Craig Carlos Perez

Anniversary


The day will come

when you’ll be dead longer
than alive—thankfully

not soon.
There are of course years

long before, without you
breathing—and your years

without me even
an idea. Then there are those

infant months, when I knew
your voice, your bearded

face, not your name—
at least to speak

it aloud. And in the night,
father, I cried out

and in the day—
like now.

- Kevin Young

Clouds


My brother is a birder.
He has a life list
and when he adds new birds
it’s considered polite
to feign excitement.
And I am excited
for him.


But I’m a cloudspotter.
So far this is a much less
legitimized pasttime.
When I remark on a cool cloud
or a sky phenomenon,
and there are lots—
halos, coronas, glories, sun dogs,
cloud iridescence, virga, fallstreak holes—
cumulus, stratus, cirrus
and their genus and species and varieties—
it tends to make people self-conscious.
Or silent.
Or bored.
Kinda like when I used to
quote Shakespeare to my kids.
They hated it.
Still do.


What’s wrong with Shakespeare?
Doesn’t anybody look up?


One of these days
The Cloud Appreciation Society
will have a meet in the US.
Like minds
who like clouds.
On that day
Earth’s water atmosphere
will get its due.


No frenetic birds flitting from branch to branch,
but slow-moving arabesques
of water vapor and droplets
and ice crystals.


Which remind us
as the stars do at night
that life
is sometimes


miraculous.


- Kerry Lichlyter

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lined and shaped like a teacup.

A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.

But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand unbelieving,

that either
a First Cause said once, “Let there
be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.

But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

- Amy Clampitt

Declaring Peace


Enough. Say it slow, revel in the eff
disguised as a cough, slide on the E
until you give everything you've got
to WHEE; you're free of anything
coming next. No preference, no
acceptance. No next at all. Just
the chasm between that lonely E
and the expansive tangle
of all those letters making one
sound. Enough. Content.
All my masks in insouciant
disarray on the gleaming floor.


- Patrick Woodworth

Patience Taught by Nature

‘O dreary life,’ we cry, ‘O dreary life!’ And still the generations of the birds Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds Serenely live while we are keeping strife With Heaven’s true purpose in us, as a knife Against which we may struggle! Ocean girds Unslackened the dry land, savannah-swards Unweary sweep, hills watch unworn, and rife Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass In their old glory: O thou God of old, Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these! But so much patience as a blade of grass Grows by, contented through the heat and cold.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What If We Were Alone?


What if there weren't any stars?
What if only the sun and the earth
circled alone in the sky? What if
no one ever found anything outside
this world right here? -- no Galileo
could say, "Look -- it is out there,
a hint of whether we are everything."


Look out at the stars. Yes -- cold
space. Yes, we are so distant that
the mind goes hollow to think it.
But something is out there. Whatever
our limits, we are led outward. We glimpse
company. Each glittering point of light
beckons: "There is something beyond."


The moon rolls through the trees, rises
from them, and waits. In the river all
night a voice floats from rock
to sandbar, to log. What kind of listening
can follow quietly enough? We bow, and
the voice that falls through the rapids
calls all the rocks by their secret names.


- William Stafford

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
VIII

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violet abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?
Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,
Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

- Wallace Stevens

Before You Cut Loose,


put dogs on the list
of difficult things to lose. Those dogs ditched
on the North York Moors or the Sussex Downs
or hurled like bags of sand from rented cars
have followed their noses to market towns
and bounced like balls into their owners’ arms.
I heard one story of a dog that swam
to the English coast from the Isle of Man,
and a dog that carried eggs and bacon
and a morning paper from the village
surfaced umpteen leagues and two years later,
bacon eaten but the eggs unbroken,
newsprint dry as tinder, to the letter.
A dog might wander the width of the map
to bury its head in its owner’s lap,
crawl the last mile to dab a bleeding paw
against its own front door. To die at home,
a dog might walk its four legs to the bone.
You can take off the tag and the collar
but a dog wears one coat and one colour.
A dog got rid of—that’s a dog for life.
No dog howls like a dog kicked out at night.
Try looking a dog like that in the eye.

- Simon Armitage

Ladies With White Hair Seen From A Second Storey Window

Look down with me,
below, upon the heads of these mares.
Their calling-card to death is silver,
white as bone, grey as going mist.
How can you not love them for their courage
to wear the cap of departure,
wear it anyhow, just like anything?

The clouds upon their napes,
this declaration of what’s to come,
neither waited for, denied, nor bragged,

I with my own white hair
glorify the locks that shall unlock
the curls of snow so soon to melt,
declaring their purchase in advance
of the white graves of heaven, which are also white,
whiter than white, whiter than anything.

- Bruce Moody

Afternoon in Manhattan

Once upon a book
We walked through your Manhattan
While smoke-scented air
Drew cool in our nostrils
We strolled its wasted streets.

Your hand held mine
And I looked into your face –
“There is a man” you whispered to me,
Pointing with your voice
“With all he owns in that paper sack.”
And I knew you knew, but never how.

We paused before a new brick house
Pressed between buildings of crumbling stone.
“There,” you spoke “is where your great uncle lived,
“But his building was old and torn down.”
And I thought I felt your clear eyes cry
For the lost bricks
For those lost dead bricks that you loved.

On we walked
Through the yellowfaced streets of Chinatown
My Chinatown
With paper fans and parasols
And the odor of food spelling CHOW MEIN
In capital letters in the narrow streets.

All that afternoon we were filled with each other
No street looked dirty,
No building old and worn.
All we knew were each other’s joys
Which mingled with our own.
Then, laughing together we rode the slow train home.

- Nan Fuchs