Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

The Source of Joy

No one knows what makes the soul
wake up so happy!

Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil
from the face of God.

A thousand new moons appear.
Roses open laughing.

Hearts become perfect rubies
like those from Badakshan.

The body turns entirely spirit.
Leaves become branches in the wind!

Why is it now so easy to surrender,
even for those already surrendered?

There's no answer to any of this.
No one knows the source of joy.

A poet breathes into a reed flute,
and the tip of every hair makes music.

Shams sails down clods of dirt from the roof,
and we take jobs as doorkeepers for him.

- Rumi
(Version by Coleman Barks)

Stranded Somewhere

If you are the body, that one is the soul
of the universe. If you're the soul, that

one is the soul within all souls. Wherever
you go, whatever you are, listen for the

voice that asks, "Who will be sacrificed
tonight? "Jump up and volunteer! Accept

this cup that is offered every second.
Love has written the thousand subtleties

of this call on my face. Read. If you're
bored and contemptuous, love is a walk in

a meadow. If you're stranded somewhere
and exhausted, love is an Arabian horse.

The ocean feeds itself to its fish. If
you're ocean fish, why bother with bread

the ground grows? These jars of grief and
trouble we call bodies, throw stones and

break them! My cage is this longing for
Shams. Be my worst enemy: shatter it!

- Jelalludin Rumi
Ghazal (Ode) 926
(Version by Coleman Barks)

The Swan


Across the wide waters
something comes
floating--a slim
and delicate

ship, filled
with white flowers--
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn’t exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,

it trails
and elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy-colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband’s company--
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,

and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
white wings
touch the shore?


-Mary Oliver

Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

- Seamus Heaney

Hudson's Geese

'. . . I have, from time to time, related some incident of my

boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in The

Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures Among

Birds____'

W.H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago.



Hudson tells us of them,

the two migrating geese,

she hurt in the wing

indomitably walking the length of a continent,

and he wheeling above,

calling his distress.

They could not have lived.

Already I see her wing

scraped past the bone

as she drags it through rubble.

A fox, maybe, took her

in his snap jaws. And what

would he do, the point

of his circling gone?

The wilderness of his cry

falling through an air

turned instantly to winter

would warn the guns of him.

If a fowler dropped him,

let it have been quick,

pellets hitting brain

and heart so his weight

came down senseless,

and nothing but his body

to enter the dog's mouth.

- Leslie Norris

Grace

Thanks & blessings be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessings to them
who share it
(& also the absent & the dead).
Thanks & Blessing to them who bring it
(may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
(may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
& blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want - for their hunger
sours the wine & robs
the taste from the salt.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & work of justice, of peace.

- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

A THANKSGIVING PRAYER FROM THE IROQUOIS NATION


We have gathered and come from many different places. We have arrived safely at this place to share with each other our gifts from the Creator. So we bring our minds together as one in Thanksgiving and Greetings to one another.

We now turn our thoughts to Earth Mother. She continues to care for us and has not forgotten her instructions from the beginning of time. Now we bring our minds together in Thanksgiving for the Earth.

Now as one mind we turn our thoughts to the Waters of the Earth for they too have not forgotten their instructions from the Creator of Life. The Waters continue to flow beneath the ground, in little streams and in rivers, in lakes and in wetlands, and in the great seas. They quench our thirst and help keep us clean so we can fulfill our duty to Creation. We now bring our minds together in Thanksgiving to all the Waters of the Earth.

We now address all the Beings both seen and unseen that dwell in the Water for they too have not forgotten their original instructions from the Creator of Life to provide for us in many ways. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving and Greetings to all the Nations who dwell in the Waters.

Now we direct our thoughts to the many kinds of plants that live upon the Earth- for they too have not forgotten their original instructions. Many members of this Nation sustain those who walk upon this Earth, and many others who continue to fulfill their duties to take away the sickness of the human family and elevate human consciousness. With one mind we send our thoughts and Thanksgiving to the Plant Nations.

With one mind we now think of our relations in the many Insect Nations. Like the other members of the natural world, they too have not forgotten their original instructions to fulfill their obligation to Continued Creation. With one mind we send our thoughts and Thanksgiving to all the members of the Insect Nations.

We now gather our minds together and send Greetings and Thanksgiving to all the Animal Life in the world, for they continue to instruct and teach us even today. It is said that the Creator knew that Humans would take too much for granted if they were given all the wisdom, so instead the Creator gave a little piece of wisdom of how to live on the Earth to the different animals. We are happy that many still walk with us on our continuing journey. With one mind we send Thanksgiving to all the Animal Life in the world.

With one mind we now think of the Trees. According to their original instructions the Trees still give us shelter, warmth, food, and make the environment a suitable place to dwell. The trees remind us of the beauty and power in the natural world. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving to all the members of the Tree Nation.

We now bring our minds together and send our Greetings of Thanksgiving to the Birds. At the beginning of time the Birds were given a special duty to perform. The Creator gave the Birds instructions to each find a special place to live in the world and they should learn the song of that place. During the day, our minds are lifted by the songs of the Bird Nations. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving to the Birds of the world.

We are thankful to the Four Winds who continue to blow and cleanse the air according to their original instructions. As we listen to the Winds it is as if we are hearing the Creator's breath, clearing our minds as it blows through the trees. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving to the Four Winds.

We now turn our attention to the Thunderbeings. For they too have not forgotten their original instructions and welcome the Spring with their loud voice. Along with the lightning, they carry the waters of the spring on their backs. It is also said that the Thunderbeings were given the job to hold down the beings beneath the Earth which would prevent life from continuing. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving and Greetings to the Thunderbeings.

Our minds are as one as we send our thoughts to our oldest brother the Sun. Each day the Sun continues his instructions from the Creator of Life, bringing the light of day, the energy source of all life on Earth. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving to our oldest brother the Sun.

We now gather our minds together and give thanks to our oldest Grandmother the Moon. She holds hands with all the women of the world and binds all of the female cycles and rhythms of the Waters so we may continue to carry out our obligation to Creation. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving and Greetings to Grandmother Moon.

With one mind we send our thoughts to the Star Nation who continue to light our way during times of darkness to guide us home, and hold the secrets of many forgotten stories. Even though many of the stories are no longer in our minds, it is said it is enough to be thankful to the Stars and perhaps one day we would learn these stories again.
With one mind we send our Thanksgiving and Greetings to the Star Nation.

With our minds as one we think of the Four Spirit Beings who live in the Four Directions. At the beginning of time when the Creator first made the Human Family, it was seen that they very quickly got themselves into trouble. The Creator knew that they needed extra help and so created the Four Spirit Beings to remove the obstacles from our paths and guide us with our feelings. And now we gather our minds together as one and send our special Thanksgiving to the Four Spirit Beings.

Now we have arrived in a very special place where dwells the Great Spirit, the Creator of the Universe. As one mind we turn our thoughts to the Creator, for without the Creator we would not be able to walk on the Earth fulfilling our original instructions.

Everything we need is provided for us and all we have to remember is to give thanks. With one mind we send our Thanksgiving and Greetings to the Creator.

We have now become like one being. We send our Prayers and special Thanksgiving Greetings to all the unborn children of the future generations. We send our thoughts to the Elders and the Children for they give us guidance and purpose to live in a good way. We are thankful to all the Enlightened Teachers who have come to help us throughout the ages. We send our thoughts to the many different beings we may have missed during our Thanksgiving. With one mind we send Thanksgiving and Greetings to all of the Nations of the World.
Now Our Minds Are One.

Just Now

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

- W. S. Merwin

Untitled

After seventeen years of circling,
waiting for the other shoe to drop,
we decided to give up and marry–
and on a cold, sunny Sunday
in an empty rural courthouse, we did.
The guests were all throwing up from flu,
so we ate the nuptial rhubarb pie alone,
wondering if this was the other shoe.
Now three years after, still under icy sun,
we’re keeping our ears alert
for any sudden thumps in undusted corners.
So far, so good. We have now
both loved and endured each other
a long time. Let’s raise a glass to ourselves:
while the world was careening madly forward,
we parked our souls in the shade of the chaos,
and here we are, still alive, and pie
or no pie, still capable of joy.

- Bill Holm

Song of the Universal

1
Come said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the universal.
In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.
By every life a share or more or less,
None born but it is born, conceal`d or unconceal`d the seed is waiting.
2
Lo! keen-eyed towering science,
As from tall peaks the modern overlooking,
Successive absolute fiats issuing.
Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science,
For it has history gather`d like husks around the globe,
For it the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.
In spiral routes by long detours,
(As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
For it the partial to the permanent flowing,
For it the real to the ideal tends.
For it the mystic evolution,
Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified.
Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears,
Health to emerge and joy, joy universal.
Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men and states,
Electric, antiseptic yet, cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the good is universal.
3
Over the mountain-growths disease and sorrow,
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,
High in the purer, happier air.
From imperfection`s murkiest cloud,
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
One flash of heaven`s glory.
To fashion`s, custom`s discord,
To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies,
Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard,
From some far shore the final chorus sounding.
O the blest eyes, the happy hearts,
That see, that know the guiding thread so fine,
Along the mighty labyrinth.
4
And thou America,
For the scheme`s culmination, its thought and its reality,
For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived.
Thou too surroundest all,
Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad and new,
To the ideal tendest.
The measure`d faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past,
Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own,
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,
All eligible to all.
All, all for immortality,
Love like the light silently wrapping all,
Nature`s amelioration blessing all,
The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain,
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.
Give me O God to sing that thought,
Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space,
Health, peace, salvation universal.
Is it a dream?
Nay but the lack of it the dream,
And failing it life`s lore and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream.

- Walt Whitman

Song of Zazen

All beings are primarily Buddhas.
It is like water and ice:
There is no ice apart from water;
There are no Buddhas apart from beings.

Not knowing how close the truth is to them,
Beings seek for it afar -- what a pity!
They are like those who, being in the midst of water,
Cry out for water, feeling thirst.

They are like the son of the rich man,
Who, wandering away from his father,
Goes astray amongst the poor.
It is all due to their ignorance
That beings transmigrate in the darkness
Of the Six Paths of existence.

When they wander from darkness to darkness,
How can they ever be free from birth-and-death?

As for the Dhyana practice as taught in the Mahayana,
No amount of praise can exhaust its merits.
The Six Paramitas--beginning with the Giving, Observing the Precepts,
And other good deeds, variously enumerated,
Such as Nembutsu, Repentance, Moral Training, and so on -
All are finally reducible to the practice of Dhyana.

The merit of Dhyana practice, even during a single sitting,
Erases the countless sins accumulated in the past.
Where then are the Evil Paths to misguide us?
The Pure Land cannot be far away.

Those who, for once, listening to the Dharma
In all humility,
Praise it and faithfully follow it,
Will be endowed with innumerable merits.

But how much more so when you turn your eyes within yourselves
And have a glimpse into your self-nature!
You find that the self-nature is no-nature -
The truth permitting no idle sophistry.
For you, then, open the gate leading to the oneness of cause and effect;
Before you, then, lies a straight road of non-duality and non-trinity.

When you understand that form is the form of the formless,
Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are
When you understand that thought is the thought of the thought-less
Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma
How boundless is the sky of Samadhi
How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom
Being so is there anything you lack?
As the Absolute presents itself before you
The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus,
And your person - the body of the Buddha.


- Hakuin

Red

Toyon berries,
kindling the mind’s eye, the spirit body
on a shriveling December morning.
Ideas enough to span the Serengeti
spawn inside me, all from a dither of red
in a ransacked plantation of green.
Red so deep it ferrets behind my eyes,
rounding up neurons, branding synapses
yelling Wake up! I am the soul of being alive.

I am the fluid rhapsody in your veins
I am the bass note in a sunshine symphony
I attract hummingbirds to your lips
I am the satin lining of your joy pocket
I gloss your infant body at birth

I am red, ruby red, garnet red, crimson red,
pomegranate, scarlet and betelnut.

My eyes can discern red just coming on,
red at its zenith, red passing its time, fading,
finally red making landfall, becoming un-visible.
After, my eyes rest, zinging with the memory.

I know the rev of red cannot by sustained,
I ask for only a scatter of berries
throughout my days.

- Penelope La Montagne

Night Turn

In late summer after the day's heat is over
I walk out after dark into the still garden
wet leaves fragrance of ginger and kamani
the feel of the path underfoot still recalling
a flow of water that found its way long ago
toads are rustling under the lemon trees
looking back I can see through the branches
the light in the kitchen where we were standing
a moment ago in our life together

- W.S. Merwin

Journey Into The Interior

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.

- Theodore Roethke

The Thread
*
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.

- Denise Levertov

To a Leaf Falling in Winter

At sundown when a day's words
have gathered at the feet of the trees
lining up in silence
to enter the long corridors
of the roots into which they
pass one by one thinking
that they remember the place
as they feel themselves climbing
away from their only sound
while they are being forgotten
by their bright circumstances
they rise through all of the rings
listening again
afterward as they
listened once and they come
to where the leaves used to live
during their lives but have gone now
and they too take the next step
beyond the reach of meaning

- W. S. Merwin

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

Ice Bound

Sky’s gray sheet spreads icy rain.
Through the night we heard the branches cracking.
Now they bend with the bowed ache of apostrophes.
Backs to the window, sitting on the couch, we listen
as the radio announces the list of schools closed.

An hour earlier I inched my way along
the road, tires spinning toward the ditch.
Now I read aloud to a teenage daughter,
who tolerates my foolishness, my claim
that Lao Tzu traversed a more slippery world.

With two books open on my lap, one in my hand,
two on the floor, I’m surrounded by imperfect
translations: a gathering chaos; something
mysteriously formed; without beginning,
without end; formless and perfect.

She responds, Sure,
I knew that, so what? I persist:
that existed before the heavens and the earth;
before the universe was born. She’s ready to go
upstairs and listen to the radio. I ask,

What was her face before her parents were born?
she answers, Nothing. I ask again.
She says it again. Where are the angels,
nights on humble knees, the psalms of faith,
the saints of daylight? She walks out of the room.

I’m surrounded by thin books.
How pointless to go anywhere on this day,
or maybe any other, but then
the time comes when there is
no other way but to stand firm on ice.

- Walter L. Bargen

A Physics of Sudden Light

This is just about light, how suddenly
One comes upon it sometimes and is surprised.

In light, something is lifted.
That is the property of light,

And in it one weighs less.
A broad and wide leap of light

Encountered suddenly for a moment —
You are not where you were

But you have not moved. It’s the moment
That startles you up out of dream.

But the other way around: It’s the moment, instead,
That startles you into dream, makes you

Close your eyes — that kind of light, the moment
For which — in our language — we have only

The word surprise, maybe a few others,
But not enough. The moment is regular

As with all the things regular
At the closing of the twentieth century:

A knowledge that electricity exists
Somewhere inside the walls;

That tonight the moon in some fashion will come out;
That cold water is good to drink.

The way taste slows a thing
On its way into the body.

Light, widened and slowed, so much of it: It
Cannot be swallowed into the mouth of the eye,

Into the throat of the pupil, there is
So much of it. But we let it in anyway,

Something in us knowing
The appropriate mechanism, the moment’s lever.

Light, the slow moment of everything fast.
Like hills, those slowest waves, light,

That slowest fire, all
Confusion, confusion here

One more part of clarity: In this light
You are not where you were but you have not moved.

- Alberto Rios

Long Course

The days crawled by on their hands and knees
As we sat meditating.
Forty-five beads
on the thread of time-
a Buddhist rosary.
But no prayers to Buddha-
only respect
and gratitude.

- Tina Rosa

Deepening The Wonder

Death is a favor to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity,
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just traveling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks

And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that

We are just a midair flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world

Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.

- Hafiz

The tragic gap . . .



Tonight I heard the voice of hope,

speaking to a small gathering of souls

in a poorly heated room

that once was warm,

once was home and hearth for family,

for an American family, released from internment—

the family of Fred and Mary Okamoto.



In the way of things—

zoning laws get passed,

neighborhoods get changed forever,

commerce insinuates itself here and there

and homes, some homes, cease to be homes—

Oh, Felix culpa! Oh, happy accident!



Following Hiroshima, following Nagasaki,

following the Enola Gay and Mr. Tibbets,

following Little Boy and Fat Man,

following J. Robert Oppenheimer,

following all of this and following, also, their internment,

Fred and Mary allowed their home to house

for more than half a century, the council—

the World without War Council.



And in the way of things—

people grow old

and old warriors for peace fade

along with their military brethren

and make way, then, for what is to follow—

a different paradigm, this time, for peace.



The home of Fred and Mary,

in happy serendipity,

houses now the Metta Center

for Nonviolence Education.

And into this center came,

on that chilly December evening

at the very close of our first decade

of the twenty first century—in the way we mark our time—

into to this center came that voice of hope I heard.1

It came from an unassuming presence and was softly spoken.

It told a tale more powerful than hate, more powerful than ignorance

more powerful even than Little Boy or Fat Man—

a tale of the human spirit, a tale of what can be, a tale of what actually is—

unarmed, nonviolent peace makers entering war zones

and without judgment or ideology bringing hostilities to a halt.



And so, dear listener, I share this tale with you

that you may know and have hope too,

that you may know hope is not a solitary thing.

It must be sought and fought for.

It must be labored for.

It must be shared to live.

But as my voice of hope reminded me,

in closing, hope does not live in isolation,

separate from the slaughter and the suffering

we see and feel in our gut—if we allow ourselves to.

We cannot live, he said, in pain alone nor in hope alone.

We must live in the tragic gap,

holding at once the pain

and the knowing

of what can be—

alive to our own being—

as excruciating

and as joyful

as that is.

- Bill Denham

Intruder

I step out before breakfast
to a chorus
of retreating white-tailed haunches,
twisting asunder, gouging grass,
in random scatter of evasive maneuvers, until

one tawny body lifts high and
weightless,
over a berm of chopped branches,
and all stop -
mid-retreat
as if by some silent signal.

We stare,
stretching our spirits
across the chasm of the wild,
their deep brown eyes
serious, stern, searching,
at last, relieved:
only me, after all -

the rain falls softly,
pearls in silence
on their ancient backs, nascent antlers.

- Scott O'Brien

Already



When I get off the coach with the rest of the travelers

Who have already departed one by one before the terminal,

Then all will be empty. The old horses

Dragging it down the ruts

Wheeze and wrangle with the hitches,

Two nags, hair always changing color,

Choleric, persistent, and remorseless.



When I leave that coach, be sure of this:

It will be empty, a terminus attained

By a vacancy.



If nothing come of this,

If not even one hiker perches his thumb on the passing air,

(For a vessel gone before),



Then pick up your little luggage of life

And trudge back

The way you came, into

That disappearance. They will welcome you

With open arms. You will be lost

In their affection. That will be the price.



But this price, the daily hay,

Great as it is, is still less

Than the fortune you would spend

Distributing candy and infantilization.



There is a rumor I heard

About thieves like me. Some steal

And are imprisoned. Others,

And the whole world goes free.



- Bruce Moody

A Christmas Carol

Away in a manger
or a crack house
or under a bridge
or in a bomber-out village
or a refugee camp
or in the mesquite shade close to the border wall
some Mary is giving birth.

Even as you read this
a child is being born.

What if one of these were the promised one,
the beacon of hope,
the seed of a new light
in a dark time?

What if they all were?
What gifts would you bring
if you were wise?

- Larry Robinson

How She Works
for Donna

She is Persephone with no
Demeter to rescue her. Above
is always winter. Inside the cave
she calls her office,
she is a schizophrenic talking
to the voices that enter her head.
Disembodied voices chatter in her ears,
she chats to the bodiless. Her disembodied
voice climbs into their ears wherever
they might be in their caves
they call offices.

She is hungry for more
than pomegrantes, craves poetry,
oysters and ripe stuffed olives.

At night she dreams
if she sleeps.
She dreams of something she cannot
imagine and so it has no name.
Tight ripe buds push like crowning
babies birthing into bright, electric air.
Thin shoots of palest green
wiggle and thrust through dark, amazed
earth. Because she is blind
she cannot name the colors. There are
so many, no one could name them.

She dreams of Spring.
She dreams of breathing.
She dreams her mother is searching for her.

- Rebecca del Rio

God's Wounds

Through the great pain of stretching
beyond all that pain has taught me
the soft well at the base
has opened, and life
touching me there
has turned me into a flower
that prays for rain. Now
I understand: to blossom
is to pray, to wilt and shed
is to pray, to turn to mulch
is to pray, to stretch in the dark
is to pray, to break surface
after great months of ice
is to pray, and to squeeze love
up the stalky center toward the sky
with only dreams of color
is to pray, and finally to unfold
again as if never before
is to be the prayer.

- Mark Nepo

Could Hope inspect her Basis

Could Hope inspect her Basis
Her Craft were done --
Has a fictitious Charter
Or it has none --

Balked in the vastest instance
But to renew --
Felled by but one assassin --
Prosperity --

- Emily Dickinson

Written on Christmas Eve, 1513

I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.

There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much,

very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can

come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.

Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within

our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.
And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!



Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering,

cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you

will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power.

Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you.

Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there.

The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Your joys, too,

be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.


Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering,

that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it; that is all!

But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together,

wending through unknown country home.


And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings,

but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and

forever, the day breaks and shadows flee away.

- Fra Giovanni

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day



Things are not as they seem: the innuendo of everything makes

itself felt and trembles towards meanings we never intuited

or dreamed. Take, for example, how the warbler, perched on a



mere branch, can kidnap the day from its tediums and send us

heavenwards, or how, held up by nothing we really see, our

spirits soar and then, in a mysterious series of twists and turns,



come to a safe landing in a field, encircled by greenery. Nothing

I can say to you here can possibly convince you that a man

as unreliable as I have been can smuggle in truths between tercets



and quatrains on scraps of paper, but the world as we know

is full of surprises, and the likelihood that here, in the shape

of this very bird, redemption awaits us should not be dismissed



so easily. Each year, days swivel and diminish along their inscrutable

axes, then lengthen again until we are bathed in light we were not

prepared for. Last night, lying in bed with nothing to hold onto



but myself, I gazed at the emptiness beside me and saw there, in the

shape of absence, something so sweet and deliberate I called it darling.

No one who encrusticates (I made that up!) his silliness in a bowl,



waiting for sanctity, can ever know how lovely playfulness can be,

and, that said, let me wish you a Merry One (or Chanukah if you

prefer), and may whatever holds you up stay forever beneath you,



and may the robin find many a worm, and our cruelties abate,

and may you be well and happy and full of mischief as I am,

and may all your nothings, too, hold something up and sing.



- Michael Blumenthal

I Thought Again of Jacob Kahn

Then I thought again of Jacob Kahn and again I wondered:
Do we all get old and sick so quickly? Then there is almost
no time left at all...Do you hear the pain carried on the wind? It is the cry of wasted lives...Who dares add to that cry? Who dares drain the world of its light?”


Chaim Potok - My Name Is Asher Lev



Being wheeled when wheeling

long ago had such a free turning

sound to it, the breeze

the wheels that wings lift over wind.



But here today I am cargo

transported to still another clinic,

a depot which may send me further on,

the difference being, I don’t know where I’m going.



Just months ago, not long before

his death, my father’s face topped this

image, I doing the pushing,

he offering his dependence.



But from my transported perspective

such trust implies surrender,

which, according to eastern philosophy,

sort of is the goal.



Here today though being

transported, I do not find yielding

to be at all agreeable.

My mind has so ever much more



to consider, paintings to be

painted, poems to be written

about so many things in illusory time,

and all about finches.



Red-headed paradise finches

observed darting suspended by

me? But I do not affect little birds

except, perhaps, when I frighten them.



Finches are not suspended

by me.

Birds do not dart by such cause.

I ain’t their puppeteer.



Yet I mustn’t waste an instant

even when I begin (or terminate) feeling

so numbingly tired,

I need to remember to write, to edit.



While, much of this I’ll cut to shard,

The red-headed paradise finches

must remain intact,

in touch with all that nests herein.



One finch burned

red into both my retinas,

flitted about such corneas as

laid like ice in wait.



When a paradise finch clicks

into material lenses,

pollinating sight with cochineal

dust such stuff of vivid fairies,



I, along with Jacob Kahn, hold

little tolerance for wasting any detritus

that once discovered turns glorious

when we ourselves take wing.



- Ed Coletti

The Cellist of Sarajevo


Tomazo Albinoni could never have imagined Sarajevo

as he crafted the notes of his Adagio.

The son of a wealthy man, he had no cares,

and devoted himself to music.

A self proclaimed dilettante,

indulging himself in beauty.


The Adagio enfolds the listener,

seven minutes of deliberate playing,

slowing the breath as the bow strokes the strings,

the cello’s voice, so human,

words murmured behind a secret door.


In the Hell of Sarajevo rumors of fresh bread,

a connection to a normal world, now so far away.

They stood in anticipation, the smell so tantalizing,

as the bakery disappeared in the blast of mortar shell.


For twenty two days, one for each of these neighbors,

he carried his cello to the crater,

clad in black and white, music on the stand.

Amidst the snipers and the rubble,

playing Albinoni’s Adagio for them, and for himself.

Like Orpheus, ascending on the music

from the underworld of despair.


Tomazo wrote music for the pure simple joy of it,

but Vedran descending the Adagio’s minor chords,

to find the steady pulse -

a precise and stately dance on

the path leading out of Hell.

Dipping into the wells of practice,

the waters of beauty seeping into his, and our, being.

Every stroke a conscious vote to return.

Each note a step on the shattered path to life.

- Alan Cohen

Hokusai Says

Hokusai says Look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says Look Forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself
as long as it's interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,

every one of us is ancient,
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive -
shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn't matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn't matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn't matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
are life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.

He says don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

- Roger Keyes

Buckeye

Heading up the Tuolomne
one early July evening
the steep slopes slant back and away
from the movement of water

a pale tawny boneyard of trees
stretches river bank to ridgeline.
The skeletal clatter of limbs
sours the day, this encounter
with so much death. In the narrows,
those dry sculpted shapes become clear.
Like a dream the trouble melting
in a comedy of error.
It is the buckeye, thousands strong
summer deciduous, proud, bare.
Other trees beginning to bloom and fruit,
watch the buckeye leaves curl in the heat,
wonder what’s wrong, as the miscreant tree
papers the ground with fandangos of
spiraled, sunburned currency.

The buckeye, clearly out of step,
its towering white panicles
coming too late in the season
and rivaling each bride’s bouquet.
November buckeye is still bare
and bent with fruit, leathery pears
that drape then crack then let go
the smooth amber seed the Pomo
made a mash of these and poured it
into the river to stun the fish
and carried the nub of the nut
around like a lucky rabbit’s foot.
January finds other trees napping,
while buckeye opens her monkey’s fist
of leaves, each little open hand gestures

hang on, I am here to tell you
the others are coming, in time,
all will be coming in good time.

- Penelope La Montagne

Advice


Someone dancing inside us
has learned only a few steps:
the "Do-Your-Work" in 4/4 time,
the "What-Do-You-Expect" Waltz.
He hasn't noticed yet the woman
standing away from the lamp.
the one with black eyes
who knows the rumba.
and strange steps in jumpy rhythms
from the mountains of Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
something unexpected will happen;
if they don't, the next world
will be a lot like this one.

- Bill Holm

After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa

New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.

This moth saw brightness
in a woman’s chamber—
burned to a crisp.

Asked how old he was
the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.

Blossoms at night,
like people
moved by music

Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!

Fiftieth birthday:

From now on,
It’s all clear profit,
every sky.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

These sea slugs,
they just don’t seem
Japanese.

Hell:

Bright autumn moon;
pond snails crying
in the saucepan.

- Robert Hass

Biscuits Beyond Compare

When I first started cooking at Tassajara, I had a problem. I couldn't get my biscuits to come out the way they were supposed to. I'd follow the recipe and try variations, but nothing worked These biscuits just didn’t measure up.

Growing up I had "made" two kinds of biscuits. one was from Bisquik and the other from Pillsbury. For the Bisquik biscuits you added milk to the mix and then blobbed the dough in spoonfuls onto the pan—you didn't even need to roll them out. The biscuits from Pillsbury came in a kind of cardboard can. You rapped the can on a corner of the counter and it popped open. Then you twisted the can open more, put the premade biscuits on a pan and baked them. I really liked those Pillsbury biscuits. Isn't that what biscuits should taste like? Mine just weren't coming out right.

It's wonderful and amazing the ideas we get about what biscuits should taste like, or what a life should look like. Compared to what? Canned biscuits from Pillsbury? Leave It to Beaver? People who ate my biscuits could extol their virtues, eating one after another, but to me these (perfectly good) biscuits just weren't "right. "

Finally one day came a shifting-into-place, an awakening: not "right" compared to what? Oh, my word, I'd been trying to make canned Pillsbury biscuits! Then came an exquisite moment of actually tasting my biscuits without comparing them to some (previously hidden) standard. They were wheaty, flakey, buttery, "sunny, earthy, real" (as Rilke's sonnet proclaims). They were incomparably alive, present, vibrant—in fact much more satisfying than any memory.

These occasions can be so stunning, so liberating, these moments when you realize your life is just fine as it is, thank you. Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product made it seem insufficient. Trying to produce a biscuit—a life—with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger was so frustrating. Then savoring, actually tasting the present moment of expedience—how much more complex and multi-faceted. How unfathomable. A thought. . . a feeling. . . ants crawling on the ground in the sunlight.

As zen students we spent years trying to make it look right, trying to cover the faults, conceal the messes. We knew what the Bisquik Zen Student looked like: calm, buoyant, cheerful, energetic, deep, profound. Our motto, as one of my friends said, was, "Looking good. " We’ve all done It: trying to look good as a husband, wife or parent. Trying to attain perfection. Trying to make Pillsbury biscuits.

Well, to heck with it I say, wake up and smell the coffee. How about some good old home cooking, the biscuits of today. Handle each ingredient with sincerity arid whole-heartedness. The results will take care of themselves. Savor them.

- Ed Brown

Thank you- loved it- great way to start the New Year
wonderful reminder of acceptance of what is
reminder to be grateful for what we have and love it
either love it or do it another way

To A Friend whose Work Has Come To Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

- William Butler Yeats

Straight Talk from the Fox

Listen says fox it is music to run
over the hills to lick
dew from the leaves to nose along
the edges of the ponds to smell the fat
ducks in their bright feathers but
far out, safe in their rafts of
sleep. It is like
music to visit the orchard, to find
the vole sucking the sweet of the apple, or the
rabbit with his fast-beating heart. Death itself
is a music. Nobody has ever come close to
writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot
be told. It is flesh and bones
changing shape and with good cause, mercy
is a little child beside such an invention. It is
music to wander the black back roads
outside of town no one awake or wondering
if anything miraculous is ever going to
happen, totally dumb to the fact of every
moment's miracle. Don't think I haven't
peeked into windows. I see you in all your seasons
making love, arguing, talking about God
as if he were an idea instead of the grass,
instead of the stars, the rabbit caught
in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought
home to the den. What I am, and I know it, is
responsible, joyful, thankful. I would not
give my life for a thousand of yours.

- Mary Oliver

*Phenomenal Woman
*
*Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

- Maya Angelou

Snow



Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth
I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.

Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs.

I dragged the sled by its rope,
which we normally did not do
when snow was coming down so hard,
pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name

as if we could be other people under the skin.
The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim
of the head where the hair starts coming out.
And it was a big one. It would come down and down
for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.


How are you doing back there? I shouted,
and he said Fine, I’m doing fine,
in the sunniest voice he could muster
and I think I should love him more today
for having used it.

At the top we turned and he slid down,

steering himself with the rope gripped in
his mittened hands. I stumbled behind
sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go!
as if we were having a good time.
Alone on the hill. That was the deepest

I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.

How there can be a place

so cold any movement saves you.

Ho! You bang your hands together,
stomp your feet. The father could die!
The son! Before the weather changes.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

The Lost Empire
I
And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden.
Its victories were air, its dominions dirt:
Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan.
The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy’s shirt
like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges.
Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags
fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis
went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag,
with tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj
to a sobbing bugle. I see it all come about
again, the tasselled cortege, the clop of the tossing team
with funeral pom-poms, the sergeant major’s shout,
the stamp of boots, then the volley; there is no greater theme
than this chasm-deep surrendering of power
the whited eyes and robes of surrendering hordes,
red tunics, and the great names Sind, Turkistan, Cawnpore,
dust-dervishes and the Saharan silence afterwards.

II
A dragonfly’s biplane settles and there, on the map,
the archipelago looks as if a continent fell
and scattered into fragments; from Pointe du Cap
to Moule à Chique, bois-canot, laurier cannelles,
canoe-wood, spicy laurel, the wind-churned trees
echo the African crests; at night, the stars
are far fishermen’s fires, not glittering cities,
Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,
but crab-hunters’ torches. This small place produces
nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers
on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens
a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us
merely receiving vessels of each day’s grace,
light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts.
I’m content as Kavanagh with his few acres;
for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea’s lace,
to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts.

- Derek Walcott

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco.../Rumi-2010.jpg

For the ninth year, Rumi's Caravan is returning to Sebastopol on February 6.

Critics have called Rumi's Caravan "The number one poetry and cultural event of the year for the North Bay."
This is truly a magical evening of poetry, music and amazing food!

Ecstatic poetry will be recited by Doug Von Koss, Kim Rosen, Shepherd Bliss, Maya Spector, Barry Spector, Richard Naegle, Kay Crista, Carol Fitzgerald and Larry Robinson.

Musical accompaniment will be by Kim Atkinson, Chris Caswell and Cindy Albers.

The event begins at 7:00 PM
and will be held at the Sebastopol Masonic Center
373 Main Street (across from Safeway)
Doors open at 6:30 PM

Tickets are $20 and all proceeds go the benefit local non-profits.

This event has sold out for the past four years, so you may want to get your tickets early by calling Many Rivers Books at 707-829-8871.



Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you've broken your vow
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.

- Jelalludin Rumi

Lose your way

Lose your way
and you are where you are.
Lose sleep
and you see the stars.
Lose hope
and you cannot be frustrated.
Lose your dreams
and you befriend reality.

Don’t hold your breath,
notice it.

Follow it.
Let it go,
Let it come,
And return with it,
come back again
to your essential
sufficient
self.

Where you are,
how you are,
who you are,
be.
Alive.


- Scott O'Brien

Love Comes Quietly

Love comes quietly,
Finally drops around me,
On me, in the old way.
*
What did I know,
Thinking myself able to go alone
All the way?
*
-*Robert Creely

The Great Mother

The Great Mother does not care about us.
Our personal lives do not move her.
Her concerns are
the raising up of mountains,
the wheeling of stars in the heavens,
the nightly rising of the moon,
the turning of the seasons.
We are so small, so ephemeral,
Our plight is less than a bother,
Not even a pesky mosquito to swat aside.
She is not kind,
but neither is she cruel.
She is busy.

- Maya Spector

Earthquake

I am not really surprised, after what happened in my country, Haiti
Not only Haiti, but in the entire world.
Because life is an earthquake,
It happens daily.
It is perpetual, constant without end.
There are earthquakes within families,
Earthquakes between friends,
Between great philosophers,
Among countries, nations, religions,
And even earthquakes of humans against God

Today, I love, cherish, and even give my life for my partner.
Tomorrow will bring an earthquake to our bond,
The one who I would die for today, I might kill her myself tomorrow.
Divorce or worse could happen.

The earthquake is so strong,
I am forced to stop writing.
Open your hearts and give to those who need.
“Smile… Don’t be angry, only God knows.”

- Anold Etienne

(Anold Etienne is a Haitian artist painter. He currently resides in Chestnut Ridge, NY.)

Judean Date Palm

The dandelion seed needs
only the rumor of rain
to open its doors
and begin to unfold.

Some seeds, like the chaparral,
are only released
by the merciless grace
of fire and smoke.

Some must travel
the labyrinth
of an animal gut
for their casings to soften.

Still others, like the olive or date,
can sleep safely for centuries
until some crushing blow
awakens the mystery within.

I like to think that,
just before those zealots,
sure of their righteousness
and unbent before the legions
gathering on the plains below,
stepped into eternity,
one among them -
a child perhaps -
savored one final taste
of the sweetness of this life.

Two thousand years later
in Kibbutz Ketura
a young palm tree is growing
from the pit of that date
dropped on the heights of Masada
to await its own rebirth.

- Larry Robinson

Enough

I think it is enough,
at times,
to go without knowing
where the end is,
what the beginning--
so long ago.

Perhaps you have friends
who can whisper
such things
in your ear,
hear little bits of
messages
in the laughter of children.

But mostly we just proceed ahead,
not remembering
how it all started,
where it is leading,
not sure
if we are the waiting animal
or the animal's passing
shadow
in the grass.

- Dorothy Walters

Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh



Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,

Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,

Because it is poky when cold,

Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,

Because it is flighty,

Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,

Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;

And I lose them and find them,

Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;

And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,

Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,

And it goes with me out every morning;

We fill up our baskets, get back home,

Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

- Gary Snyder

Poem after a walk in the woods


I went for a walk in the woods alone at sunset
with my dog
and the earthquake in Haiti
and the health care bill passed by the senate
and a great horned owl
and at least 3 hunters in the surrounding hills
apparently trying to set some kind of a record for ammunition wasted in a one hour period

my feelings about the hunters
were different than my feelings about the owl
though a vole or a mouse might have felt
that the threat in the sounds they made
was pretty similar

and I enumerated in my mind the 4, or was it five, basic goals of the health
care bill passed by the senate, and left it to rest somewhere in the muddy
footprint left by a moose

and for awhile I walked with the ghosts of the people killed in the earthquake in Haiti
hundreds of thousands of them, covered with plaster dust
possibly more than the total number of people killed in the Iraq war
and thought of Pat Robertson, who said, and I paraphrase,
that the Haitians had made a pact with the devil and he was taking his due,
and this comment showed an unprecedented sense of poetry
because how could something so overwhelmingly sad and desperate
come of something so mundane as the subduction of one plate of earth under another?
Certainly an injury this huge in the fabric of the universe
must have been the result of divine intervention.

And I walked with the millions of people who will, like T cells and macrophages and fibroblasts in the dark body of the earth, heal, but oh so excruciatingly slowly, this deep and bleeding laceration.

and then I was just walking with my dog
who was barking at the vole she had unearthed
overjoyed with this intimate interspecies interaction
and then performing brief and truly inadequate CPR with her nose

and the owl again
and the hunters
and the sun setting through grey clouds on the stubble fields and forested hills
the golden light
on the half frozen ponds
of the place I walked
which lacked nothing
of perfection

- Janice Boughton

Poem for the Poorest Country In the Western Hemisphere

Oh poorest country, this is not your name.
You should be called beacon, and flame,

almond and bougainvillea, garden
and green mountain, villa and hut,

little girl with red ribbons in her hair,
books-under-arm, charmed by the light
of morning,

charcoal seller in black skirt, encircled by dead trees.

You, country, are the businessman
and the eager young man, the grandfather

at the gate, at the crossroads
with the flashlight, with the light,

with the light.

- Danielle Legros Georges

I believe there is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing – for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean.

There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmonid knows its creek.

Intellectually we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins.

The spectacular truth – and this is something that your DNA has known all along – the very atoms of your body – the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and so on, were initially forged in long-dead stars.

This is why, when you go stand outside under a moonless country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards.

- Jerry Waxman
( From Astrological Tidbits)
Jerry was a gifted professor of astronomy at Santa Rosa Junior College. He died earlier this year from complications related to Parkinson's Disease.

Praise Them

The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We're the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?

- Li-Young Lee

A Valley Like This

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened -
there was nothing, and then...

But maybe sometimes you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don't watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party your life is.

- William Stafford

The Inside Chance

Dance like a jackrabbit
in the dunegrass, dance
not for release, no
the ice holds hard but
for the promise. Yesterday
the chickadeees sang fever,
fever, the mating song.
You can still cross ponds
leaving tracks in the snow
over the sleeping fish
but in the marsh the red
maples look red
again, their buds swelling.
Just one week ago a blizzard
roared for two days.
Ice weeps in the road.
Yet spring hides
in the snow. On the south
wall of the house
the first sharp crown
of crocus sticks out.
Spring lurks inside the hard
casing, and the bud
begins to crack. What seems
dead pares its hunger
sharp and stirs groaning.
If we have not stopped
wanting in the long dark,
we will grasp our desires
soon by the nape.
Inside the fallen brown
apple the seed is alive.
Freeze and thaw, freeze
and thaw, the sap leaps
in the maple under the bark
and although they have
pronounced us dead, we
rise again invisibly,
we rise and the sun sings
in us sweet and smoky
as the blood of the maple
that will soon open its waving
leaves by the thousands.

- Marge Piercy

Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle

Try to love everything that gets in your way;
The Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin and doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side and
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim past obstacles like a minnow,
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking, Obstacle,
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she'll have that to look at the rest of her life, and
keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren't supposed
to be in the pool at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
may be a young man at a wedding on a boat,
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He'll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he'll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to the larger story,
because if something is in your way, it is
going your way, the way
of all beings: toward darkness, toward light.

- Allison Luterman

After

There is one thing certain.
Once you have stood
in the midst of that
searing flash,
been struck down
to earth
like a Mongol taking his bride
on the steppe,
and have lain there,
waiting,
not quite certain—

how can you ever know again
what it is
not to be blinded by the light,
never to have gone there
to the top of the snow hung peak
and felt that nameless something
descend onto your shoulders,
your breast,
even as you bent forward
in disbelief.

- Dorothy Walters

Light

Walking uphill,
late morning, as
the ripening sunlight
invigorates, yet eases,

I catch sight
of a fallen post,
gate clamp still bolted,
by Paul years ago,

bringing
to mind
his easy smile,
his quiet, helpful way,

and his passing, weeks ago, in fullness,
and, oddly, feel my step
lighten, my eyes lifted

up to clouds silent, white
afloat overhead
and see:
so we pass.

And so, live.

- Scott O'Brien

A Marriage, an Elegy

They lived long, and were faithful
to the good in each other.
They suffered as their faith required.
Now their union is consummate
in earth, and the earth
is their communion. The enter
the serene gravity of the rain,
the hill's passage to the sea.
After long striving, perfect ease.

- Wendell Berry

The Grapes of My Body.

The grapes of my body can only become wine
After the winemaker tramples me.
I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling
So my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy.
Although the grapes go on weeping blood and sobbing
"I cannot bear any more anguish, any more cruelty"
The trampler stuffs cotton in His ears: "I am not working in ignorance
You can deny me if you want, you have every excuse,
But it is I who am the Master of this Work.
And when, through my Passion, you reach perfection,
You will never be done praising my name."

- Rumi

Nova In Night Sky

The river and I are lovers.
We are always together
Separate, but not apart.

The river is tender and temperamental.
It hurls me towards ragged rocks and snags,
and just at the moment of impact
sweeps me away,
toward our mutual destiny.

I come to the edge and I am tossed down.
I fall and I fall until
I feel there is no reprieve.
I hit the water and
fall farther down.
Sucked into a swirling vortex
I spin and I spin
until I do not know
where I am going
or who I am.

And then
I am spit out
into the cool sweet air.
I float, empty,
forever it seems,
until the morning light warms the water.

The river and I are lovers.
It terrifies me
and fills me with such great joy.
It holds me in tender arms
until undulating waves rock and bounce me.
Wave after wave
until I am filled with such heat
that my heart pounds
my head swells
my body bursts
and I become Nova
in night sky.

I fall back upon
the body of the river
spark by spark by spark
until, the river and I
are one.

- Sally Churgel

Peace Pilgrim, You Are Still Walking

on the long roads, late at night. So many years
after you died, you're not off the hook, you're keeping
the pace, swinging your strong arms.
Who among us found a clearer way?
I shall not accept more than I need
while others in the world have less than they need.
We can work on inner peace and world peace
at the same time. Little people of the world,
may we never feel helpless again.
I marveled at your many-layered pinecone heart
and 3 possessions: toothbrush, postage stamps, comb.
Walk till given shelter, fast till given food.
Still, you're starting before dawn,
pausing at a roped-off trail that says,
THIS IS NO LONGER A FOOTPATH,
shaking your head. I'm sorry you can't rest yet.
One day I woke thinking, it's good you're dead.
We're still fools in a world of war.
Then I recalled the navy canvas of your suit,
how it always felt fresh, not tired.
We listened as hard as we could. What can't we learn?
I would establish a peace department in our government.
Under the swollen orange moon.
On the rim of the sad city, in a cardboard box under the overpass,
you held the calm and the strong conviction.
Oh Peace. Dear Peace.
Don't give up on us. Don't leave us stranded, please.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Mildred Norman Ryder, the woman known as "Peace Pilgrim," began walking in 1953 for the termination of the Korean War, a U.S. Department of Peace, and for nuclear disarmament. She counted the miles she had walked until she reached 25,000 in 1964, but she continued making pilgrimages across the country until the time of her death by car accident in 1981, according to the Friends of Peace Pilgrim Web site.

Peace Pilgrim spoke often of the "freedom of simplicity" and urged those who wished to contribute to world peace to first abandon material desires and achieve peace within themselves, sayswww.peacepilgrim.org.

Spelled Differently



When I allowed myself to be spelled differently,

the alphabet itself stood at attention

then collapsed in a bale of laughter.



Try on a new face, it spelled out.

Well, I am. It has wrinkles and squintier eyes.



Try on a new body, it again spelled.

Well, hey, this one’s not getting any younger.

Certain sags and bulges are blooming.

Bones, hidden, remind me they are there.



Try on a new mind, it suggested.

So I was flabbergasted again and again.

Dumbfounded. Everything I thought I knew

dissolved. Where to begin?



Try on a new heart, it cajoled:

Bigger-better, wider, kinder.

Oh, all right, I said, in a somewhat disgruntled manner,

and began the intricate work

set before me.



So remember:

who you thought I was: I am not.

For I am spelled differently now,

in an alphabet of an as yet undecipherable language

in a tongue foreign to my own name.



- Tina Devine

A Man Talking To His House

I say that no one in this caravan is awake
and that while you sleep, a thief is stealing

the signs and symbols of what you thought
was your life. Now you're angry with me for

telling you this! Pay attention to those who
hurt your feelings telling you the truth.

Giving and absorbing compliments is like
trying to paint on water, that insubstantial.

Here is how a man once talked with his house,
“Please, if you're ever about to collapse,

let me know.” One night without a word the
house fell. “What happened to our agreement?”

The house answered, “Day and night I've been
telling you with cracks and broken boards and

holes appearing like mouths opening. But you
kept patching and filling those with mud, so

proud of your stopgap masonry. You didn't
listen.” This house is your body always

saying, I'm leaving; I'm going soon. Don't
hide from one who knows the secret. Drink

the wine of turning toward God. Don't examine
your urine. Examine instead how you praise,

what you wish for, this longing we've been
given. Fall turns pale yellow light wanting

spring and spring arrives! Trees blossom.
Come to the orchard and see what comes to

you, a silent conversation with your soul.

- Jelelludin Rumi

Night and the River

I have seen the great feet
leaping
into the river

and I have seen moonlight
milky
along the long muzzle

and I have seen the body
of something
scaled and wonderful

slumped in the sudden fire of its mouth,
and I could not tell
which fit me

more comfortably, the power,
or the powerlessness;
neither would have me

entirely; I was divided,
consumed,
by sympathy,

pity, admiration.
After a while
it was done,

the fish had vanished, the bear
lumped away
to the green shore

and into the trees. And then there was only
this story.
It followed me home

and entered my house—
a difficult guest
with a single
tune

which it hums all day and through the night—
slowly or briskly,
it doesn’t matter,

it sounds like a river leaping and falling
it sounds like a body
falling apart.

- Mary Oliver

John Muir on Mt. Ritter

After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble dawn the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.

- Gary Snyder

Day to Day Devotions

Imagine making of your life, a prayer
A worship, a devotion. Imagine moving
through the world in celebration
casting alms by the sure presence
of your faith in life.

Imagine waking and rising to
be an invocation, a gifting
in which what is most
precious to you is invited
into the world.

Imagine eating and bathing as
sacramental, a communion with
the sacred other, a remembrance
of all our relations whereby
our own self is given form.

Imagine breathing and walking,
touching and holding to be the
movements of your soul as it
feels its way into your
arms and legs, those
“inlets of soul in our age” as Blake reminds us.

Imagine talking and listening
as rituals of meeting
where who you are is
welcomed into the
heart of another.

Imagine these day to day devotions
as the purest chance you have
of redemption. Imagine
these simple gestures as
God’s sweetest blessing.

- Francis Weller

Steelhead Valentine

Every year on Valentine’s Day I celebrate the return of the steelhead, Oncorhynchus mykiss (their species name). Mykiss—what could be more perfect?

Whether the run is late or early, on Valentine’s Day they are always in the river, thrusting upstream, in the laguna, in the creeks, heading home in an ecstatic urgency, driven back to their natal beds to spawn. If you watch the creeks in patient silence you will see them. If you listen at night, you will hear them leaping, slapping cradles in the gravel bars.

They are here right now, as you read this--a thread of the culture of this place that stitches you to the people who came before you, just as they stitch the land to the sea, returning nutrients with their very bodies. The carcasses of those that die feed critters all the way up the food chain--that osprey flying overhead a month from now, those river otters I saw last year up at Fitch Mountain.

When you reach for your beloved, think of them. Half in air, he stutters across shallows, rushing to reach her. Veiled in dark water, she glides over the gravel. They are dancing when your hands entwine. He circles over her back. They weave the water in figure eights. She turns on her side, a rainbow through rain.

To hold them in you heart is to value an old companion. To hold them in your heart is to keep clean cold water in our creeks. To hold them in your heart is to protect our streams from toxins and sediment, to keep our hills forested, to restore our urban waterways.

Once by streamside with my lover, we saw a steelhead fly up from the froth of a waterfall, fall back, leap again, fall back, leap again. Love and instinct. Without them, what would life be?

- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

There is a girl inside

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a greeen girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

- Lucille Clifton



FEBRUARY 15, 2010

R.I.P. poet Lucille Clifton
Those who were still snow-bound last weekend might not have heard the sad news: Former state poet laureate and National Book Award winner Lucille Clifton died Saturday at age 73, after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. Her obituary in the Baltimore Sun noted that the long-time Columbia resident was known for a mix of profundity, earthiness and humor in her 11 books of poetry.

The obit listed some of her many honors: She was state poet laureate from 1979 to 1985. She was the first black woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize award (2007), which is among the most prestigious awards for American poets and which carries a $100,000 stipend. She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000" and was a two-time Pulitzer finalist.

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

- Leonard Cohen

Want to be a free man?

It’s simple
first shed your clothes
they say too much about what you wish to be

next, to eliminate the compulsion to dominate remove your testicles and
set them on a shelf high overhead

now lay your ego by the side of the road and in your sternest voice give
the command, “stay!” then run like hell until you can’t hear its protests
anymore

expunge your history by taking a fist sized eraser and rub it away so that
you are not a man anymore, nor are you a Catholic or a protestant or a Jew
or a Muslim you are not Mexican, German or Chinese

don’t consider the future, in fact so you won’t think at all
put your brain in the freezer (thinking is overrated)

find a clock and smash it between two large stones
and feel your way through days and nights

forgive yourself and your children for not being enough
forgive your ex, forgive god for not giving you the answers you seem to
think He owes you

now find a place in the shade, sit silently and then listen closely to
everyone particularly the birds until you recognize the miracle of breath

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

Practice

Not the high mountain monastery

I had hoped for, the real

face of my spiritual practice

is this:

the sweat that pearls on my cheek

when I tell you the truth, my silent

cry in the night when I think

I’m alone, the trembling

in my own hand as I reach out

through the years of overcoming

to touch what I had hoped

I would never need again.

- Kim Rosen

Complaints

The dead complain we lack
the skill to keep them buried.
But that's the grave's job
and there's no safe burial ground.
They'll shine up through the earth
spreading their affection.

They're offered refuge
under markers and memorials
but they refuse and wait
for us in unlit places
tapping their white canes
with the terrible patience
of those possessing time.

In the slow caress of years,
our weight is doubled by
the burden of others
we cultivate and carry,
and deep in the future
our children keep us alive.

- Ruth Daigon

(Ruth Daigon died February 17. You can view her biography at Tryst Poet Emeritus: Ruth Daigon.)

Fool's Errands

A thing
cannot be
delivered
enough times:
this is the
rule of dogs
for whom there
are no fool's
errands. To
loop out and
come back is
good all alone.
It's gravy to
carry a ball
or a bone.

- Kay Ryan

THE WOLF INSIDE

Every dog knows there’s a wolf inside

It is our deepest source of pride.

If I say there’s a wolf in you

Where does your mind go?

Rapacious wolf pack?

Old horror movies?

Terrifying fairy tales?

My dear cousins on two legs

What fear has locked you in that cage?

Where wolves sit quietly outside

Looking at you with soft eyes

Waiting to teach you about family

And cooperation and playfulness.

Here’s my advice:

Throw Little Red Riding Hood out on her ass!

Get down on all fours and play with us

As if you life depended on it.

It does.

- Warren Peace

(Translated from canine by Brian Narelle)

Recession

A grotesquerie for so long we mostly ignored it:
Illuminated mammoth Santa atop
the Quikstop's roof, presiding over pumps
That gleamed and gushed in the tarmac lot below it.
Out back, with pumps of their own, the muttering diesels.
And we, for the most part, ordinary folks,
Took things for granted: the idling semis' smoke,
The fuel that streamed into our tanks, above all
Our livelihoods. We stepped indoors to talk
With friends, drank coffee, read the local paper,
Which now bears news of hard hard times. We shiver
Our afternoons are gone. At five 0'clock -
Though once we gave the matter little thought -
Plastic Santa no longer flares with light.

- Sydney Lea

Waiting for the Fire



Not just the temples, lifting

lotuses out of the tangled trees,

not the moon on cool canals,

the profound smell of the paddies,

evening fires in open doorways,

fish and rice the perfect end of wisdom;

but the small bones, the grace, the voices like

clay bells in the wind, all wasted.

If we ever thought of the wreckage

of our unnatural acts,

we would never sleep again

without dreaming a rain of fire:

somewhere God is bargaining for Sodom,

a few good men could save the city; but

in that dirty corner of the mind

we call the soul

the only wash that purifies is tears,

and after all our body counts,

our rape, our mutilations,

nobody here is crying; people who would weep

at the death of a dog

stroll these unburned streets dry-eyed.

But forgetfulness will never walk

with innocence; we save our faces

at the risk of our lives, needing

the wisdom of losses, the gift of despair,

or we could kill again.

Somewhere God is haggling over Sodom:

for the sake of ten good people

I will spare the land.

Where are all those volunteers

to hold back the fire? Look:

when the moon rises over the sea,

no matter where you stand,

the path of the light comes to you.

- Philip Appleman

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

we are running



running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we're running
toward
is what we want.


- Lucille Clifton

Last Night As I Was Sleeping
*
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

- Antonio Machado

(Translated by Robert Bly)

More Rare

more rare
than a bird stumbling
on its shadow
than an ant lying in wait for
its prey,

more rare
than a raven
with white wings,

more rare
than a tornado
enveloped in my arms,
than a mutinous stick,
than a docile flame,

more rare
than all that

is to find myself
at peace for a moment

- Adnan Mohsen
(Translated from the Arabic by James Kirkup)

Death and His Horses


I don't remember the snow falling this evenly when I was a child.
Back then, it seemed all thick drifts and crevasses to dig my hands in.
Now, it's a pale blanket that swaddles my horses' legs.

(No, they are not white; I had borrowed one
the day the apostle took down the details.)

I keep roans and dapple-grays, nothing special.
I like the way their colors flash against
the plains, green in spring, tan in autumn, ice-white in winter.

I live for every stubborn stamp of their hooves,
the swish when they toss their manes.
Most of them I never ride, only keep them fed and watch them roam.

In this season, they stand so still
the snow piles on their haunches and dusts their tails.
they brace together for warmth
and sigh in sudden, steamy plumes.
They eye me resentfully, even at dusk when I lead them into the stables.

The grace of each day slips from their animal minds once it passes.
They forget the green season: new grass crushed between their jaws, sweet spit.
They forget estrus: animal need to regenerate.
They forget what it is to run for joy; in the cold, they only run for terror.

When night comes, I lead them to bed,
Where the straw is soft and ready for their bodies.

- Beth Winegarner

may my heart always be open

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

- e.e. cummings

Plum Branches

I snip tender limbs

knobbed with tight purple swells,

stand their legs in warm water

and wait –

impossibly delicate

pink petals

force darkness open

and sing.

- Jodi Hottel

Waylaid


As the stag and
his does startle
and bolt under
silhouetted firs
and across louring
clouds hunched
on the horizon
a miawing
cat waylays me.

While I bend low
to stroke her
the last birdsong
gives way to a tidal
cricket orchestra.
A star spills out
between the cracks.

I trudge surrounded
by bristling worries

until the whistling
electric tide
snaps me
back once more.

Clouds have vanished.
Stars skip
out to dance
a firefly
plane noses its way
into the silence.

- Raphael Block

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past.
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor
of another era. But how lovely it was,
that time in my restless memory.

This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briars
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

- Hayden Carruth

Living Things

Our poem
Are like the warthogs
In the zoo
It's hard to say
Why there should be such creatures

But once our life gets into them
As sometimes happens
Our poems
Turn into living things
And there's no arguing
With living things
They are
They way they are

Our poems
May be rough
Or delicate
Little
Or great

But always
They have inside them
A confluence of cries
And secret languages

And always
They are improvident
And free
They keep
A kind of Sabbath

They play
On sooty fire escapes
And window ledges

They wander in and out
Of jails and gardens
They sparkle
In the deep mines
They sing
In breaking waves
And rock like wooden cradles.

- Anne Porter

The Journey

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

small, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

- David Whyte

IOWA , winter in town, 1941

Furnace heat flows up my flannel pajamas
from the hot grate on the kitchen floor.
When you're nine, it's a boon.

Don McNiell, all the way from Chicago, calls out,
"second call to breakfast, Philco's call to breakfast"
every school morning from our own
Philco Cathedral radio on the shelf that Dad built.
Boon number two.

Oatmeal bubbling at my elbow on the big burner
of the Tappan stove with the always wrong clock
I stand by with the full cup of raisins.
Boon number three.

Watching my Dad shaving and singing
with that radio at the cracked porcelain sink
with the stainless steel back splash
he made to last forever.
His delight with his off key singing is ...
Boon number four.

"Hand me a towel," he says, "not that one
with the chicken, that one with the stripe."
No boon, no harm.

The mismatched oak chairs,
this time painted a strange green
crowd around the way too big table
in the too small Iowa kitchen.
No harm.

I get the worst seat in the room, there,
by the G.E. frig with the coil on top.
"Hand me this. Hand me that.
Honey boy, reach for the milk in there."
Still lookin' for a boon.

And the yellow and red rose patterned oil cloth,
from Woolworth's Five and Dime,
scrubbed at least three times a day,
so close to my nine year old nose
never stopped stinking.

- Doug von Koss

On the banks of that river, the river Gualala—

Memorial Day Weekend 2003



On the banks of that river, the river Gualala,

in the forest land of the Kashia Pomo

whose few remaining and ancient redwood elders

first stretched skyward

centuries before the birth of Christ,

amidst a community

of ordinary men

who had gathered there,

I was held,

for an instant,

by the clear night air,

as if in a dream,

on the edge

of an unseen

precipice.



Quiet, open and attentive,

straining to see, I gazed steadily

into the gradual, growing light

of another dawn,

and into that dimness

a faint, yet terrifying beauty began

to emerge—

contours of a vast, unexplored canyon

intricate,

surprising shapes,

carved, carefully over the years,

down,

down through the richly colored, layered,

soft sandstone

of my soul—



shapes, etched in the beginning upon the surface

by tiny rivulets

of loss,

insinuating their way down

into cracks and crevices,

cutting

little gullies,

growing gradually into streams,

small tributaries,

yearning to be a part

that final flowing river

of loss.



And with that fleeting vision

came a certainty,

a knowing where I must go—

down those treacherous

crumbling canyon walls,

down deep

beyond denial,

beyond rage,

down those canyon walls

till I reach that river

and plunge headlong

into the years

and years

and years

of unshed

tears.

- Bill Denham

We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

Things About The Sun

Any time the sun
touches our part of the earth
we say the sun shines.

Sometimes dogs bark at the sun,
but I don’t mind it.

There are flowers the sun never sees.

Many times I have said to it,
“Wait!” And it waited.

With the sun, it will be all right
after I’m gone.

Where it can, the sun endlessly
examines things, nothing too large
or small for long, long attention.
When I walk I would view
like that -- all: rich, poor, young,
old, near, far. And I’d save a report
for whenever the sun does.

Mornings when it looks
at me, for an instant there are
all those other times.

- William Stafford

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.


- Mary Oliver

The Dry Tortugas

They were building a house in the Dry Tortugas,
less for the solitude there than the open eyes
of a swallowtailed hummingbird they had seen once
on a fishing trip — the early Fifties, he reeling in
an oversized yellowfin, Humphrey Bogart
facing the wind, one foot on the rail in To Have and Have Not,
she whistling the stuttered call of the Amazonian kingfisher,
and singing in Spanish to flocks of Bonaparte gulls.
It comes to nothing in the end, though the land
is paced off and measured and two palms felled
to expand the view, a road graded the requisite mile,
and some of their friends fly down from New York
to surprise them, circle the islands all morning, gleeful and chic
in their 4-seater Cessna (he's something exalted at Chase),
and later the bottles of Myer's and Appleton Gold sweat
dark rings on the terrace flagstones, and someone's pink
lipstick makes delicate kissprints along the rim of her glass.
No one has told me what happened — his heart
attack in Guatemala, her premonition about the wide
and empty view, or the world swinging in
with its usual brazen distractions — but they framed
the architect's plans of the house, and this
is what I inherit, a rendering in colored pencil:
what they were dreaming before I was born.

- Molly Fisk

The Enigma We Answer by Living
*
Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.
*
I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?
*
This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,
*
who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—
*
one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,
*
tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down
*
he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.
*
And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,
*
though he knows it will all disappear—
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,
*
that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging
*
from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet
*
that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.
*
- Alison Hawthorne Deming

Thatcher

Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow
Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they'd snap.
It seemed he spent the morning warming up.

Then fixed the ladder, laid out well-honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched alltogether
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
and left them gaping at his Midas touch.

- Seamus Heaney

The Ticket

On the night table
Beside my bed
I keep a small
Blue ticket ...

I keep it carefully
Because I'm old
Which means
I'll soon be leaving
For another country

Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
Enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border

And ask
To see my ticket.

- Anne Porter

The Man Who Killed His Brother

I do not know
how to spare him
from this wound
that still throbs
beneath the flesh.

Reminder of how it was,
that sudden rip of light,
that toppling,
the discovery
that nothing
could be undone, ever, act frozen in
time.

How he has lived with it,
so many days,
so many nights
stretching into manhood,
carrying it
like a weight of
stone fastened to his back,
always the sorrow,
unending grief,
ceaseless lamentation
of the heart.

Even now it is sobbing quietly,
still not knowing,
if it ever did,
how not to remember.

- Dorothy Walters

(The man who accidentally killed his younger brother, in a hunting accident, was the well known poet Gregory Orr. I wonder how many of us still carry the pain of unintentional hurts we dealt to others at some time in the past. footnote: Dorothy Walters)