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I have a Wendell Berry poem that you posted a long time ago -The Peace of Wild Things. I have it taped onto my desk right in front of me and have taken comfort from it many a time. I just sent it to a friend in trouble, hoping it would soothe him some. Thank you for doing this.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Percherons
My sister and I went out to them with sugar
cubes and bridled their heads when they bent down
to eat from our palms. We led them over
to the long white fence on which we climbed
to the topmost rail, then threw our legs
across their backs, clutching the reins to steady
ourselves against their girth, steering them out
into the hills until we were lost, or thought
we were, only to find ourselves at Judith
Creek or Holcomb Rock where we’d turn back
in the early dark, gripping their manes, crouching
low, galloping hard on the high soft
road across the fields to the open barn.
- Chard DeNiord
The Morning’s News
The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head
at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes
open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake
in the agony of the old giving birth to the new
without assurance that the new will be better.
I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,
they are so open to the world.
I look at my sloping fields now turning
green with the young grass of April. What must I do
to go free? I think I must put on
a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die
rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.
I will purge my mind of the airy claims
of church and state. I will serve the earth
and not pretend my life could better serve.
Another morning comes with its strange cure.
The earth is news. Though the river floods
and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,
faithful to a mystery in a cloud,
and the summer’s garden continues its descent
through me, toward the ground.
- Wendell Berry
Borrowing
What do we own after all in this life?
Shards of the moon, a shudder of pearl
through oak leaves wrestling with the wind,
its light borrowed, as our own hearth fires,
from the sun.
Wouldn’t it be better if from the beginning
we learned the truth – that all is lent,
that only our souls belong to us, and they, too,
only for the lease-hold of our days,
and little we know that number or what comes after.
Astonishing in sunlight, the lilies have split their long buds
to open each separate petal -- butter yellow blossoms
ignited like the moon, as if from within.
Remember spring’s first grass?
The same impossible incandescence
we once held and now must bring forth from within
to burnish and give unto others – slyly
and without effort, assuming another purpose – light
escaping everywhere -- in the bodhisattva who passes
no judgment, the old horse alone in the field, or the man
in Tianamen Square, side-stepping to stay in the path
of the tank. Light, the flood of it! Brief
and unforgettable -- the broken moon, the lilies of the field.
- Elizabeth Herron
A Day is Coming
A day is coming
in which misery will end.
A day is coming
in which poverty
will open bank accounts
in every nation.
A day is coming.
I hear it coming.
A day is coming
in which the
campesino
will gather his children a green spring
and go on vacations.
I believe it.
I see it.
A day is coming
in which a soldier will be
decorated
for helping
instead of killing
his poor brother.
A day is coming
in which lovers
will serve themselves from large bowls
warm love and faithfulness.
A day is coming
in which the Christ who returns
is the Christ who never left.
A day is coming
in which the father will ask the son
for friendship
instead of respect.
A day is coming
in which the student
and a poor laborer
will be half and half.
A day is coming
in which the prisoners
come out
running in the fields and shouting
about their freedom.
A day is coming,
I see it coming.
- Lalo Delgado
It is no gift I tender,
A loan is all I can;
But do not scorn the lender;
Man gets no more from man.
Oh, mortal man may borrow
What mortal man can lend;
And 'twill not end to-morrow,
Though sure enough 'twill end.
If death and time are stronger,
A love may yet be strong;
The world will last for longer,
But this will last for long.
- A.E. Housman
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 ...
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
elegy for the red-breasted bird, rev 1
for Robin
red-breasted bird
crimson song as wide as his heart
gifts of joy flying off every feather
bringer of light and promise
that dark and cold are not forever
to exorcise his pain
he has taken his all from us
to end the despair
he has bled his wounds to silence
hearing again the mourning-shrouded message
that something was at its end
its time was up
he thought it meant his life entire
all too common a mistake
the hand of death abides
holds the hand of life itself
they walk together yin and yang through all our days
our battles our celebrations our silent hours
we who tire of the unwelcome darkness
we who cannot imagine
coming through the next endless night
we who hear the roaring siren call of surcease
and lie in the shadows of forgetting
are easy prey for the lurking error
the knife is always at the ready
it can kill or it can pare
behold how often do we prune the vine so it will flower
dead-head the rose to urge its blossom
run one more lap to tone the tired muscle
it is too late for him
red-breast will not serenade again
but the call to die will rise in us again
the call to death is real its urgency intense
demanding response it will not disappear
but let us listen again
it is a gift a priceless tune
and we must remember how to hear it
we must harken we must seek
we must embark on the dark treasure hunt
until the hidden culprit is known
until what must be heard behind the siren-song is heard
until what has become burden is left behind
until that which is at its end is allowed to die
until what keeps us fettered is released
so that all that can still live and laugh and love in us
does remain
- Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg
©
Building With Its Face Blown Off
How suddenly the private
Is revealed in a bombed-out city,
How the blue and white striped wallpaper
Of a second story bedroom is now
Exposed to the lightly falling snow
As if the room had answered the explosion
Wearing only its striped pajamas.
Some neighbors and soldiers
Poke around in the rubble below
And stare up at the handing staircase,
The portrait of a grandfather,
A door dangling from a single hinge.
And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed
By its uncovered ochre walls,
The twisted mess of its plumbing,
The sink sinking to its knees,
The ripped shower curtain,
The torn goldfish trailing bubbles.
It’s like a dollhouse view
As if a child on its knees could reach in
And pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.
Or it might be a room on a stage
In a play with no characters,
No dialogue or audience,
No beginning, middle and end-
Just the broken furniture in the street,
A shoe among the cinder blocks,
A light snow still falling
On a distant steeple, and people
Crossing a bridge that still stands.
And beyond that- crows in a tree,
The statue of a leader on a horse,
And clouds that look like smoke,
And even farther on, in another country
On a blanket under a shade tree,
A man pouring wine into two glasses
And a woman sliding out
The wooden pegs of a wicker hamper
Filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.
- Billy Collins
The Kookaburras
In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them
no, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.
- Mary Oliver
not an elegy for Mike Brown
I am sick of writing this poem
but bring the boy. his new name
his same old body. ordinary, black
dead thing. bring him & we will mourn
until we forget what we are mourning
& isn’t that what being black is about?
not the joy of it, but the feeling
you get when you are looking
at your child, turn your head,
then, poof, no more child.
that feeling. that’s black.
\\
think: once, a white girl
was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan war.
later, up the block, Troy got shot
& that was Tuesday. are we not worthy
of a city of ash? of 1000 ships
launched because we are missed?
always, something deserves to be burned.
it’s never the right thing now a days.
I demand a war to bring the dead boy back
no matter what his name is this time.
I at least demand a song. a song will do just fine.
\\
look at what the lord has made.
above Missouri, sweet smoke.
- Danez Smith
well at least something beautiful has come out of this tragedy ...
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Talk
It’s more than time we had that talk
about what to say and where to walk,
how to act and how to strive,
how to be upright and stay alive.
How to live and how to learn,
how to dig and be dug in return.
When to concede and when to risk,
how to handle stop and frisk:
Keep your hands where they can see
and don’t reach for your ID
until they request it quite clearly.
Speak politely and answer sincerely.
The law varies according to where you are,
whether you’re traveling by foot or driving a car.
It won’t help to be black and proud,
nor will you be safer in a crowd.
Keeping your speech calm and restrained,
ask if, in fact, you’re being detained.
If the answer is no, you’re free to go.
If the answer is yes, remained unfazed
to avoid being choked, shot or tased.
Give every cop your ear, but none your wit;
don’t tempt him to fold, spindle, mutilate, hit
or otherwise cause pain
to tendons, bones, muscles, brain.
These are things you need to know
if you want to safely come and go.
But still there is no guarantee
that you will make it home to me.
Despite all our care and labor,
you might frighten a cop or a neighbor
whose gun sends you to eternal sleep,
proving life’s unfair and talk is cheap.
- Jabari Asim
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
- Langston Hughes
The Street Cleaner
She had a purpose
Cleaning the streets
Some days it was dirt
Some days it was trash
And some days it was
Rose petals
From the funeral marches
Strewn on the road
By insane mothers and fathers
Who lost their sons and daughters
Infants and grand-children
To war
She heard the voices
Which arose from the dead
Bodies never buried
With her broom in hand
She dutifully
Made circles of rose petals
In the quiet places
To honor them
A touch of beauty
She thought
In this time of darkness
Then she moved on
Her palm frond broom in hand
Cleaning
- Corlene Van Sluizer
Stop Throwing My Country To The Wind
If the flames of anger rise any higher in this land
Your name on your tombstone will be covered with dirt.
You have become a babbling loudmouth.
Your insolent ranting, something to joke about.
The lies you have found, you have woven together.
The rope you have crafted, you will find around your neck.
Pride has swollen your head, your faith has grown blind.
The elephant that falls will not rise.
Stop this extravagance, this reckless throwing of my country to the wind.
The grim-faced rising cloud, will grovel at the swamp's feet.
Stop this screaming, mayhem, and bloodshed.
Stop doing what makes God's creatures mourn with tears.
My curses will not be upon you, as in their fulfillment.
My enemies' afflictions also cause me pain.
You may wish to have me burned, or decide to stone me.
But in your hand match or stone will lose their power to harm me.
- Simin Behbahani
(1927-2014)
(Translated from the Farsi by Kaveh Safa and Farzaneh Milani)
Rise and Fall
Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.
Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.
Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.
Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.
Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.
Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.
Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.
- Larry Robinson
Poetics
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper — though
that, too — but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.
- A. R. Ammons
Sure On This Shining Night
Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand’ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.
- James Agee
Meadowsweet
Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic
women poets were buried face down.
So they buries her, and turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar*,
not knowing the liquid
trickling from her lips
would seek its way down,
and that caught in her slowly
unraveling plait of grey hair
were summer seeds:
meadowsweet, bastard balm,
tokens of honesty, already
beginning their crawl
toward light, so showing her,
when the time came,
how to dig herself out -
to surface and greet them,
mouth young, and full again
of dirt ,and spit, and poetry
- Kathleen Jamie
*cold and damp air: fog
The Earth Quaked
03:20
as sudden as
a missile strike
quaking earth
sent me rushing
naked into the street
what does it mean when we no
longer trust the ground we stand on?
or the sky above?
did it wake the birds?
did they too hold their breath
waiting for
the great silence?
- andrew zarrillo
The Last Drought
Winds that bring no clouds
clouds that carry no rain
falling rain that doesn’t reach the ground
I grieve bitterly for the home that has been lost
tonight outside: sounds of rain, of a thin
brief rain falling to the piteous earth—
voices tender as ghosts
that claim neither present nor future
yet the memory of a birth-right to rain
lingers— crystalline, flawed
reaching across synapses
that are already doomed by delusion
we are dispossessed
we wait
but we are owed nothing by the sky.
- Lee Perron, © 2014.
The Man with the Hoe
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power.
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More fraught with menace to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?
- Edwin Markham
Crow Justice
As I pump gas, a flock of crows passes
Overhead. Then another flock arrives,
And another, and a third, fourth, and fifth.
Jesus, the sky itself is made of crows,
And they’re louder than the nearby freeway.
Could this be a family reunion?
Maybe these dark birds are planning for war.
Then, with one great hush, the flock goes silent,
And separates into living currents,
And forms winged rivers around a mid-air
Island of three quickly deserted crows.
Why? I don’t know at first, but then one bird,
Much larger than the rest, breaks from the flock,
Quickly followed by other large, fast birds,
And leads a mass attack on the lost crows
And snap-snap-snaps their necks, and as they fall,
Tears them in half. As the crow-pieces hit
Hot pavement, the flock, as one, celebrates,
Yes, they celebrate, And I realize
That I saw a public execution.
A murder of crows, indeed, but what crimes,
Among the crows, are punishable by
Death? I can’t begin to understand crow
Morality, Hey, I don’t want to try,
But justice, like time, flies and flies and flies.
- Sherman Alexie
He uses language with such artistry
But what a dreadful image of the man
Without whose labors we would revert to
The life of shepherds, hunter/gatherers.
If I'm missing something here please tell me -
Tell me what it is. Tell me what you see
Tell me what you hear. Tell me what you know
Tell me how you wrap your mind around it.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Markham was deeply touched by a woodcut print he saw of an exploited laborer. It haunted him and his emotional response resulted in the poem. His words:
“As I studied Millet’s The Man with the Hoe, I realized that I was looking on no mere man of the field: but was looking on a plundered peasant, typifying the millions left over as the debris from the thousand wars of masters and from their long industrial oppressions, extending over the ages. This Hoe-man might be a stooped consumptive toiler in a New York City sweatshop; a man with a pick, spending nearly all his days underground in a West Virginia coal mine; a man with a labor-broken body carrying a hod in a London street; a boatman with strained arms and aching back rowing for hours against the heavy current of the Volga.”
The social reform movements of the time were the perfect fuel for the rise in popularity of this poem. He is talking about the injustice of exploitation of labor through time, from the beginning of human recorded history up until and including the labor exploitation he saw in his present world.
The lines you cite refer to the fact that so very little appreciation is felt towards the extremely hard labor that goes into the luxuries we enjoy, so without these labors, we would still be in the hunter gatherer phase of human development. We can still say the same thing today. Without the labor of farm workers planting, plowing, pruning and picking in the hot California sun, we would not be able to enjoy the gifts of avocados, grapes, citrus fruits, lettuce, peppers.
Aldous Huxley said “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by gardenmaniac:
thank you so much for this, Chris. I had no idea. And his words about the painting? As powerful as the poem ...
On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example --
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived..."
- Nazim Hikmet
Nazim Hikmet was arrested and sentenced to 28 yrs in prison on the grounds that military cadets were reading his poems, particularly the Epic of Sheik Bedreddin 1936 about the 15th c. peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule. It was the last of his books to appear in Turkey during his lifetime.
With Few Exceptions
All death is generic, off the
rack, or on, it's one thing or
another. Old age, that Fool
who crossed the centerline
with whom you now share
That same sad anniversary.
Death of the celebrated is
still simply a dissolution of
sorts, even assassinations,
poisonings, softly in the
Bed-You-Made. Generic,
not custom, not special, an
Organ or another fails, a cell spirals
into more, then more, replicating
its cruel self. All death is like that
not exceptional unless
You're the one jogging that
Lonely stretch of beach just as
a rotting Whale reaches gaseous
Perfection and explodes,
or while walking the dog, a perigee moon
making midnight into day, a drop
of Space Detritus finds you unaware
and unafraid and the dog stays beside
you while you gratefully
tell your life goodbye.
- Rebecca del Rio
The Last Wolf
The last wolf hurried toward me
through the ruined city,
and I heard his baying echoes
down the steep smashed warrens
of Montgomery Street and past
the ruby-crowned highrises
left standing,
their lighted elevators useless
Passing the flicking red and green
of traffic signals
baying his way eastward
in the mystery of his wild loping gait
closer the sounds in the deadly night
through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks
I heard his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came
floor by empty floor to the room
where I sat
in my narrow bed looking west, waiting
I heard him snuffle at the door and
I watched
He trotted across the floor
he laid his long gray muzzle
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow
his small dotted eyebrows quivered
Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.
- Mary TallMountain