Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Last Words
for Harry

I love you, repeated
Four times over
Your daughter, ours
Listening to your breath
Quiet as the moments
Between the chimes
On the Hour.

I love you, you
Told her. I stood
outside your circle
Self-exile of years
Years that allowed us
To love each other
In ways marriage couldn't.

I love you
your gift to her,
To me to know
Your anger, disappointment
Dissipated.

I love you, you said
To who? What?
Four times over.
The penultimate perhaps to Life
The last to Love itself
As you fell into eternity's embrace.

- Rebecca del Rio

A Man's A Man for A' That

Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an a' that,
Our toils obscure, an a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an a' that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine -
A man's a man for a' that.
For a' that, an a' that.
Their tinsel show, an a' that,
The honest man, tho e'er sae poor,
Is king o men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie ca'd 'a lord,'
What struts, an stares, an a' that?
Tho hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
His ribband, star, an a' that,
The man o independent mind,
He looks an laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an a' that!
But an honest man's aboon his might -
Guid faith, he mauna fa' that!
For a' that, an a' that,
Their dignities, an a' that,
The pith o sense an pride o worth.
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may
[As come it will for a' that],
That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree an a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
It's comin yet for a' that,
That man to man, the world, o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that.

- Robert Burns

And it has a lovely tune as well....

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

A Man's A Man for A' That

...

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Belonging

The small plot of ground
on which you were born
cannot be expected
to stay forever
the same.

Earth changes,
and home
becomes different
places.

You took flesh
from clay
but the clay
did not come
from just one
place.

To feel alive,
important, and safe,
know your own waters
and hills, but know
more.

You have stars
in your bones
and oceans
in blood.

You have opposing
terrain in each eye.

You belong to the land
and sky of your first cry,
you belong to infinity.

- Alla Renee Bozarth

won’t you celebrate with me

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

- Lucille Clifton

The Mystery of You



If you’re not careful,

you can give your

whole life away


one chapter at a time.

Rarely living your own

wild nature.


Thinking

you will have time

later


to follow that beckoning

inner compass

- Kay Crista

Ermeo di San Francesco
At the Hermitage of St. Francis in Assisi

If he were to speak to me today, he would smile
slightly, laughing at my concerns about this, about
that. He would extend his hand, opened palm,
inviting me to sit down, to find my spot exactly
where I am. If today he were to speak to me, he
would open his arms to the comforts of life right
here, on this ground where I stand, the sun baking
my back, the cool rock supporting me. Without
words, he would tell me, wherever I am I can lay
my head, wherever I walk is the place to be. He
would point to the sky, the trees, the ground below
my feet, cup his ear to the birds, the breeze, the
words that need not be spoken.

- Clara Rosemarda

Becoming Bostonian

I hear the music of seven languages
on a four-block stretch of Harvard Square,
see the copper glow of the Hancock
Tower at sunset, feel the familiar
bump of cobblestones under my feet.
Mark Twain said people in New York ask
"How much is he worth?" while Bostonians
ask "How much does he know?" That burning
desire to discover keeps the city humming,
yet we’re grounded in history, too,
still treading on sidewalks made of
baked clay. I stand
one night on Beacon Hill, gaze up at the
few stars city lights allow to shine,
feel myself stretched between past and future
the pull of the earth on which
our forefathers stood, the pull of the moon,
which they could not have dreamed their descendants
would visit. Or perhaps they did.
One historian reports that
"there were books on Beacon Hill while wolves
still howled from the summit." Perhaps some
Englishman closed his book one night and stood
where I stand, dreaming of what we’ve become.

- Lawrence Kessenich

Disillusion

I would be simple again,
Simple and clean
Like the earth,
Like the rain,
Nor ever know,
Dark Harlem,
The wild laughter
Of your mirth
Nor the salt tears
Of your pain.
Be kind to me,
Oh, great dark city.
Let me forget.
I will not come
To you again.

- Langston Hughes

The Place for No Story


The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.

- Robinson Jeffers

When Giving is All We Have



One river gives

Its journey to the next.



We give because someone gave to us.

We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.

We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,

We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you

What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.


- Alberto Ríos

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?

Wait 'til I whup George Foreman's behind.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

His hand can't hit what his eyes can't see.

Now you see me, now you don't.

George thinks he will, but I know he won't.

I done wrassled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale.

Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.

I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.

- Muhammad Ali
(1942-2016)

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection


Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.


- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Halle Berry Caught in Disneyland Without Makeup

Imagine my excitement
the fire in my blood
as my greedy fingers click through to the photo,
a lead story on this end-of-August Saturday,
the trees so dry they cannot cry
for want of tears.
America,
we need more news like this!
Forget the poisoning of bees by the billions
or their connection to our own mortality.
Forget the plight of millions
living on the streets
sans food, sans work, sans medicine.
Give us more serial killers, inflated to hero size
project their likenesses on every billboard
teach their names as school yard jump rope rhymes.
Pen graphic novels around them
etch them on video game platforms around the world.
Forget the melting ice caps
rain forest decimation
the mounting molestations by pedophile priests
the commerce of women around the globe.
Serve us more Donald Trump, please
with extra vitriol spewed from blanched lips
the small American flag smirking from his lapel.
And please, keep them coming
those photos of celebrities who dared to do the unthinkable:
leave their mansions without the shield of makeup.

- Sandra Anfang

For Someone Who Did You Wrong

Though its way is to strike
In a dumb rhythm,
Stroke upon stroke,
As though the heart
Were an anvil,
The hurt you sent
Had a mind of its own.

Something in you knew
Exactly how to shape it,
To hit the target
Slipping into the heart
Through some wound-window
Left open since childhood.

While it struck outside,
It burrowed inside,
Made tunnels through
Every ground of confidence.
For days, it would lie still
Until a thought would start it.

Meanwhile, you forgot,
Went on with things
And never even knew
How that perfect
Shape of hurt
Still continued to work.

Now a new kindness
Seems to have entered time
And I can see how that hurt
Has schooled my heart
In a compassion I would
Otherwise have never learned.

Somehow now
I have begun to glimpse
The unexpected fruit
Your dark gift had planted
And I thank you
For your unknown work.

- John O’Donohue

Denouement


Sometimes
led
into discovery
scarcely informed
what perils
lie ahead
yet trusting
the way is right and clear
rich with adventure
stops in his tracks:
Wait. Wait. Is this journey

Recklessness or Fate?
Faith or Resignation?
Wisdom or Folly?

Still the pilgrim pushes on,
eyes open to unseen things
divining the path home
fears unspoken
ever forward
to survive
tempests and dashed hopes
everything hinging
on the very next living moment
to present
itself.

- Larry Kenneth Potts

Rubai One


Birds mistook Saint Francis for a tree.

May I be so free
of nervous haste, ambition, and regret
so in the extirpation of thought
innocence and improvisation
may tell the dawn each day afresh
that fresh is what it is.

The nickname of God is Now.

- Bruce Moody

I doubt that birds mistook St. Francis for a tree. I'm sure they knew exactly who he was.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Rubai One


Birds mistook Saint Francis for a tree.

May I be so free
of nervous haste, ambition, and regret
so in the extirpation of thought
innocence and improvisation
may tell the dawn each day afresh
that fresh is what it is.

The nickname of God is Now.

- Bruce Moody

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Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

- Robert Bly

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

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

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

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman

this is beautiful, and so universal!
When I was a kid in the '50s in a suburb of St. Louis (should write something about this),
old Miss Rossi, the kind Principal of Flynn Park School, surrounded by an almost forest-like park, took to the PA system every morning to recite for us the Flynn Park Prayer and the Flynn Park Creed. This was all before the laws preventing sectarian public school prayer, and indeed I still remember The Flynn Park Prayer, part of it at least, with great love, as it too was just totally universal! It began, "KInd, heavenly, father, Help us to receive this day as a gift from your hands, and to use it earnestly and joyously..." I could look up the rest, but I remember that part because it is MEMORABLE, and, well, I still try to do that! ♥

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

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

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

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman

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(graphics by wacco Ronaldo :tiphat:)

Counting on Sunday

He didn't have his
Heart in his sermon.
If he did, it didn't Show up in any enthusiasm
In his voice.
And I didn't have
My restless soul
In church.
If I did, I wouldn't Have counted
The 823 bricks
On the wall.
Outside one Of the48
Window panes
Behind the 16
White shutters
That helped shade
The sunlight
Off the 11 crosses,
2brass, 4 on cloth,
1 on a plaque that's nailed
To the rail that leads
To the wooden one
That's carved on the altar
Just left of the
Wooden one that holds
The page numbers
That face
The one in concrete On the baptismal font
That stands beside
The organist
Who is married To the preacher who
Has a silver one
Hanging around his neck
As he speaks to
10 women, 8 men
And 4 children
Who sit in 21pews
That hold 161 Hymn books
Under 78 electric candles
That shine on
5 doorknobs
And 2 flags That stand
Over 11 eyeglasses,
7 necklaces,
2 flower arrangements,
1 hair bow,
1 bow tie,
1 silver barrette,
And a sermon
In a pear tree.

- Margaret Vaughn
( poet laureate of Tennessee)

Yeah, I've sat through some boring sermons; used to count the pieces of glass in the stained glass windows.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Counting on Sunday

He didn't have his
Heart in his sermon....

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Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now--whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they just stand there looking the way they look
when we're looking; surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade--surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptyness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

- Mary Oliver

It fell to me


It fell to me.
I don’t know why.
How can we know these things?
It fell to me to dismantle,
to take down the fortifications,
to take apart myself
not so to destroy
but to try to understand,
to hope to know
the inner workings
of a single human heart
and go from there—
to Auschwitz,
for example,
as an end point
of all that brought us there
or as a new beginning for me,
my own very private mirror
that shows a heart quite able
to morph such an image
of unspeakable acts
reflected there
never, never to be done again
into others of their kind
that go unnoticed, unseen,
unrecognized as such
until their carnage has been done
and then we say once more,
“Never again! Never again!”,
to ourselves and go on—
to drones over Pakistan
for example, run by little boys
with joy sticks and video cams
from half a universe away
and think, no doubt,
if they think at all
of what they do,
of what we ask them to do
in our name and with our money,
think, no doubt, that they are fighting evil.
“A silly comparison,” you say,
“Auschwitz and drones.
What have you learned
in all your dismantling
if this is where you end—
with drones and joy sticks?”
And where would you suggest I look, dear listener,
that I might understand more clearly
what I am complicit in—
Orlando, perhaps?
Where, dear listener, would you look?
Where would you look?

- Bill Denham

Inclination

One's throat must be like a garden
And one's eyes like windows
through which love passes;
And one's stature
Must be like a tree
that rises out of rocks;
And poetry must be like a singing bird,
Perching on the highest branch of a tree,
Breaking the heavy silence of the world.

- Hamid Reza Rahimi

:heart: OH, YEAH! :heart:

A bit of color and Paul Klee's birds.

No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
- John Donne

Pulse Night Club Orlando, FL 6/12/16, 1:49 am

I am Xavier, I am Juan, I am Enrique
You are Amanda, Frankie and Angel
We are Mercedes, Christopher and Luis
We are 6 degrees of separation
Which means there is no separation

If I could have been there at 1:49 am
I would have taken each person by the hand
Led them outside said, Look at those stars
Go home now - be safe

If I could have been there at 12:49 am
I would have kept Omar Mateen
From entering
Instead I’d take his hand
Say go home, go home
To your heart
Go home to your humanity
There you can find safety
There you will find you are not separate

I would, if I could, turn his hate into tears
I would say the distance between
Your dreams and my longing is
The distance between
Each heartbeat
I would say that we are all us
There is no you and them
Only the disconnections
of you/them in your own heart

It’s the truth that hurts the most
If I had been there at 1:49 am
I could not have done a thing

Nor could God
God gave us choice and will
We choose what we will
God says choose life
Choose life

This night
God cries with us
And asks us to remember
They are us

Choose love
Choose life

- Sally Churgel

For All The Fathers

For all the fathers with us and gone,
the ones who worked in factories
and taught us to drive cars,
the ones who knew how to put a worm on a hook
and how to get a fish, flopping, off of it.

For all the fathers, lonely on their couches,
ash trays on their bellies, the smell
of cigarettes on their hands, the blare
of the television drowning out the voices
of those too difficult to remember,
even some of those still living and breathing
in the same room.

For all the fathers reaching for their books
turning to the pages of poetry that give music
to the sounds trapped inside them, turning
the pages of manuals that informed their hands
on how to make furniture for the family, toys
for the grandchildren, cradles for the neighbor’s children
adopted from Vietnam.

For all the fathers who once, when boys, looked up
to see their own fathers standing in the place
of the men who came before them, men
who loved a good story, a certain spring flower,
the smell of dust rising after a rain.

For all the fathers who could not give
what was expected of them
and showed this by their absence, gone
in a bottle, gone on a rampage, gone
on an assignment. Gone. Gone. Gone.

For all the fathers who lifted and carried groceries
over water, babies up mountains, children off to bed,
war stories untold for decades, and memories from childhood
they could not speak of even to the ones they loved.

For all the fathers in good health and ill, for their strength
and their weariness, the dwindling away of possibility
into the wrinkles and bald spots we remember
before the final good-byes. For all the fathers,
the silent, the speaking, and the fathers
all of their young boys will become.

- Ann Arbor

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.


- Wendell Berry

A Cautionary Tale

I woke from a dream
of a circle of men where
the most basic elements of men's work
had been forgotten
where the distrust and fear anger
in men was not met with
wisdom where being here to make a racket had primacy
where we forgot to ask if we
could agree that there would be no violence
no physical violence this week
where we were reluctant to share
even our names and praise with
men we did not know
laughter and poetry singing were
thrown out, just get 'em out of here
someone said, "just punch him
in the face. I'll pay your
legal bills." it was a dark time
it was hell.

- Mark Gardiner

You Cannot Kill Me

I am not only I
but a multiplicity of souls
I have always been here
I will always be back
I was your uncle, your 5th grade teacher, your cousin
I will be your grandson, your niece, the boy next door
you can erase my words
and a new Sappho, Rumi, Whitman, Stein, Lorca, Lorde
will emerge and write what I wrote
even more beautifully
you can shatter my statues
and a new Michelangelo
with a sharper chisel and a stronger arm
will make grander statues
you can silence my singing
and a new Bessie Smith
will sound a bluer note
I have always been here
indivisible, essential
to the human spirit
firebird I am
feathered serpent
in every opposition
I am
the tender collapse
that always happens
before a song
rises up
to heaven
you see
I cannot die
you cannot
kill me


- Franklin Abbott

Campo dei FioriRelated Poem Content Details

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's word.

- Czeslaw Milosz
Warsaw, 1943
(Translation by Louis Iribarne)

My Dad As A Young Man
c. 1930

His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
He never forgot the thump of the woman landing on the hood

at the corner where he couldn't slow down to turn, she
stepped in front of the grill, the hood ornament a terrible witness.

Over the decades, he said things like, Mary, I couldn't stop.
or I saw a woman crossing the street. Never the story

beginning middle end. Either he told me she died or I just knew it.
I played my own scene of what might have happened.

His heart stopped or beat wildly or maybe both. Brain said
no, No, NO. He opened the car door, got out, stood upright.

Bright blood on packed white snow. Felt hat flung far
from her body. Fur-topped boots without her feet in them.

Screams of her friend sounded far away. And other cars,
cars with equipment that worked, brakes that worked, stopped.

All the drivers looked like his father, the robust real estate man
glaring through windshields at the son who read aloud from books.

Little details before he could look at her. A woman he'd never know,
couldn't recognize but who would spend the rest of his life with him.

- Mary L. Barnard

A Map to the Next World
for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged
from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It
must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the
altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our
children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born
there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to
disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to
them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-
ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s
small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a
spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking
from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh
deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world
there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song
she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you
will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they
entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the
destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our
tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

- Joy Harjo

For my nightmare, it would be a bicyclist on one of our narrow winding back roads wearing dark clothing and invisible in the shade of overgrown trees. Although I am sure this poem is about responsibility in keeping equipment safe, there is also responsibility on the part of the victim as well.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

My Dad As A Young Man
c. 1930

His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
...

---

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.


- Maggie Smith

A Song Of Peace

I closed my eyes in darkness
and opened them in light,
and over the world,
like a flag unfurled,
was a sweet sound and a holy sight.

A dove spread wings of magic;
its shadow was golden and broad,
and the people of earth,
in a passion of birth,
had shattered an ancient sword.

Oh, why is my country hated
and made such a thing of scorn,
this fruitful place
with its varied race,
this land where I was born?

And why is my country darkened,
when the rest of the world is light,
and cloaked in fear
of things once dear,
and weak in its frightful might?

And why are the people silent,
and where is the ancient song
that mankind found
was freedom's sound,
to shatter injustice and wrong?

We'll not have our country hated!
Our country is strong and grand.
Oh, be not dismayed
by those who betrayed
the heritage of our land.

If a song can be made so simple,
if a word can become a creed,
then the sound of peace
will gently increase,
like the harvest from the seed.

Ask not why the land is silent;
let the people measure their toil,
and the human race
will share its grace
with the lonely folk of our soil.

Its grace is new and holy,
and peace is the dream of the world,
and the people of earth
in a passion of birth
will see their banner unfurled.

The banner is pure and sacred,
enough of the swine who destroy!
Enough of the night,
the world is bright-
and the future is filled with-joy.

Our cup is running over
with the graft and the lies and the hate,
and the renegade
is too well paid
with our broken dreams and our children's fate.

We'll open our eyes in the darkness,
and boldly look to the light,
and call to our side
with earnest pride
our people who dwell in the night.

And they'll see the dove so holy,
so pure and wide of wing,
wide as the earth
in its passion of birth-
with a joyful song to sing.

And the lilt will be made so simple,
and the word will become a creed,
and the song of peace
will gently increase,
like the harvest from the seed.

- Howard Fast

Oh MY~ I hope I never look at a bird
to only think of a stone that might come by
Or receive a kindness from a stranger
even while thinking there might be one to bag me
I hope that I ever see the world as delightful and beautiful
Never mind the stains.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.


- Maggie Smith

---

The Dugout

They like it here
shaded from the sun, drinking Gatorade
in the dugout among the solitude
of brothers.

After one strikes out
or misses a ball,
angry fathers climb the gated fence
that separates spectators
from players and curse.
All night only the male crickets chirp,

nocturnal and cold-blooded.
They take on the temperature
of their surroundings.
They run the top of one wing
along the teeth
at the bottom of the other.

Their wings up and open
like acoustical sails, the sound relentless
and unending.

- Jill Bialosky

The House Dog’s Grave

I’ve changed my ways a little; I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream; and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.
So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you’d soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking pan.
I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed; no, all the night through
I lie alone.
But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
And where you sit to read–and I fear often grieving for me–
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.
You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard
To think of you ever dying
A little dog would get tired, living so long.
I hope than when you are lying
Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
No, dear, that’s too much hope: you are not so well cared for
As I have been.
And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided. . . .
But to me you were true.
You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,
I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

- Robinson Jeffers

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

- Billy Collins

Marrying Tricia Nixon

I woke up this morning recalling that Thanksgiving Day in 1962
when my seventeen-year-old self, having moved on, like a skin-shedding snake,
from his terrible, world-ending imaginings during the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous month,
had persuaded my boss, Dudley Stephenson, the wimpish,
vaguely effeminate bachelor librarian at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher
(with forty-seven lawyers then California's third-largest law firm),
to drive up Doheny Drive to Trousdale Estates, in the upper reaches of Beverly Hills,
park in front of Richard Nixon's house, and indulge the fantasy of a kid,
not two years liberated from the banal exile of foster care,
that my hero with the five o'clock shadow,
no doubt still licking his wounds from his recent loss of the California governor's race,
would drive out in his powder blue Oldsmobile 98,
take note of me, cheer up immediately,
and come to decide that I should, of course, marry Tricia.

- Bill Dickinson

America: A Prophecy (excerpt)

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

For Everything that lives is holy. For Everything that lives is holy.

- William Blake

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted


When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The ride you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

- John O'Donohue

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