Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

The Wind That Shakes The Barley

I sat within a valley green,
I sat there with my true love,
My sad heart strove the two between,
The old love and the new love, -
The old for her, the new that made
Me think of Ireland dearly,
While soft the wind blew down the glade
And shook the golden barley.

Twas hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
Twas harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen
I'll seek next morning early
And join the brave United Men!"
While soft winds shook the barley.

While sad I kissed away her tears,
My fond arms 'round her flinging,
The foeman's shot burst on our ears,
From out the wildwood ringing, -
A bullet pierced my true love's side,
In life's young spring so early,
And on my breast in blood she died
While soft winds shook the barley!

I bore her to the wildwood screen,
And many a summer blossom
I placed with branches thick and green
Above her gore-stain'd bosom
I wept and kissed her pale, pale cheek,
Then rushed o'er vale and far lea,
My vengeance on the foe to wreak,
While soft winds shook the barley!

But blood for blood without remorse,
I've ta'en at Oulart Hollow
And placed my true love's clay-cold corpse
Where I full soon will follow;
And round her grave I wander drear,
Noon, night and morning early,
With breaking heart whene'er I hear
The wind that shakes the barley!

- Robert Dwyer Joyce

Of Spouses and Fires

Half lose their husbands or their wives,
Far fewer lose homes to wildfires.
The first though worse no one survives.
Obstinate the second transpires.

No pain tops death of spouse or child,
Gloom bone cancer real or phantom
From home your hearth you’ve been exiled
Hymn of passing your sole anthem

What happens with the house rebuilt
Or another one discovered
Might fickle need produce new guilt
Front door unrecovered?

When might longing for what has passed
Transform to smoke none understands
It’s futile wisdom we’ve amassed
While gods do laugh at human plans.

- Ed Coletti

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

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Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing
under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,
and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment
my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars
and the soft rain –
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

- Mary Oliver

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

- James Wright

THE POWER OF NOW AND THEN


Now
And then
Are a spinning top:
A whirling blur of what
May have occurred way back
then in places like Egypt and at Mt. Sinai
But more recently Einstein and that quantum gang
Have informed us that now and then were one and the same.
You no doubt remember how Moses’ rod transformed into a snake
And soon after Hashem separated the Sea of reeds for the Hebrews
And so the sacred texts contain numerous moments where we see
That the stories in our hearts are not meant to be fact checked but
Are instead the ever-burning bushes illuminating one moment
That gets misconstrued as the retelling of a newspaper story
And even worse, an ironclad prediction of a cataclysm
When actually the biblical narrative circles around
The great mandala sparks of universal truths
That are forever living and rocking in the
Nestling arms of the great mysterious
Author Begetter and Originator
Of all beginnings middles
And endings of the one
Forever unfolding
And amazing
Now

Can you tell us who the poet is ?? Thanks....

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

THE POWER OF NOW AND THEN
...

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The Listening Buck


Sunday morning at the trail head,
in the east a sky kindling
over the shadowed hills.
We chat and walk in the half-light
holding hands, sometimes silent,
a kiss beside the way.
A day for beginnings and a long
climb into clear morning.

The path mounts over the rocky shoulder
of Tam’s west side. So still up here --
the clarity of the world and the sea.

We rest in a small glade--
some bread and cheese,
then out comes our book
and we read to each other.

A sound, a fallen twig, we turn to see
a buck has come quietly through the woods,
his ankles sunken in old leaves, ears piqued,
his neck stretched out to hear our words.


- Kevin Pryne

This Is Not Trivial


When prayers and good thoughts
are not enough


When a moment of silence and flag
half-mast seem irrelevant


When sending best wishes
When hoping
When contributing to a fundraising campaign
When signing a petition
When singing in a choir
lift your spirit only for a moment


When crying alone
In your kitchen
Serves no one, not even you


May you smile lovingly still
into the tired eyes of the man holding a cardboard sign
May a kindness be offered
on the passing plate
May we dare allow the sad sad news
that penetrates the fortress of longing
to melt like an altar candle
lit for one day of peace


May we remember
As a member
Of the human race
Fortunate enough
Healthy enough
Alive enough
To have this poem
Touching us
Right now


We can make every breath matter
We can forgive outrageously one more person today
We can look out from our doorway and say yes
I am here. I am here.
Is there any other way to fight?
This is not trivial:
LOVE


It matters


- Kristy Hellum

The Spring

(After Rilke)

Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!
Teacher was strict. We delighted in the white
Of the old man's beard, bright like the snow's:
Now we may ask which names are wrong, or right
For "blue," for "apple," for "ripe." She knows, she knows!
Lucky earth, let out of school, now you must play
Hide-and-seek with all the children every day:
You must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!
The happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things
You taught her: the word for "hope," and for "believe,"
Are still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.


- Delmore Schwartz

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The New Breed

for Emma Gonzalez and the other student activists

I see her on TV, screaming into a microphone.
Her head is shaved and she is beautiful
and seventeen, and her high school was just shot up,
she's had to walk by friends lying in their own blood,
her teacher bleeding out,
and she's my daughter, the one I never had,
and she's your daughter and everyone's daughter
and she's her own woman, in the fullness of her young fire,
calling bullshit on politicians who take money from the gun-makers.
Tears rain down her face but she doesn't stop shouting
she doesn't apologize she keeps calling them out,
all of them all of us
who didn't do enough to stop this thing.
And you can see the gray faces of those who have always held power
contort, utterly baffled
to face this new breed of young woman,
not silky, not compliant,
not caring if they call her a ten or a troll.
And she cries but she doesn't stop
yelling truth into the microphone,
though her voice is raw and shaking
and the Florida sun is molten brass.
I'm three thousand miles away, thinking how
Neruda said The blood of the children
ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Only now she is, they are
raising a fuss, shouting down the walls of Jericho,
and it's not that we road-weary elders
have been given the all-clear exactly,
but our shoulders do let down a little,
we breathe from a deeper place,
we say to each other,
Well, it looks like the baton
may be passing
to these next runners and they are
fleet as thought,
fiery as stars,
and we take another breath
and say to each other, The baton
has been passed, and we set off then
running hard behind them.

- Alison Luterman

Seventy Five
11 November 2017


And I think to myself, I’ll remember
this early dark and the rain; standing
before the toile-draped window, water
streaking the glass and dripping
from the low, curled iron; leaves of
wisteria vines, gold and green, trembling
in the November wind that ruffles
through the Cour Damoye.


I’ll recall Olivier, the coffee man
who calls bonjour as he brews his exotic
dark grinds in a small industrial shop
across the cobblestones.
And of course I can’t forget how
one leans full-bodied into the great iron
gate to open it at midnight, coming home
from salsa-dancing eating a hot dog.


I’ll remember every moment in its own way and
for it’s own reason or for no reason at all:
I’ll remember that on this Parisian lane
I was young one more time

- Audrey Ward

The Birthing

Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.

- Deborah Digges

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The Seder Dinner
For Sherrye on her 80th birthday

The emerald in the jeweler’s case is magnificent,
for it is rare;
the shimmering green dragonfly in the sun is more so,
for it is not.
Life constantly presents itself in a vast, breathtaking array
of ingredients; to make of it what we will.
A child wishes for an unending menu of desserts,
but the wise cook knows the balance of sweet and bitter,
rich and lean.
She works with what is given, eating each meal
as the feast that it is.
Unconcerned with whether the kitchen is clean
or if the pantry is full for tomorrow,
she savors each bite of the complex and rich stew that has
cooked over time, knowing that it nourishes her with a
deepening wisdom; a satisfying repast.
Live in fullness for all of your days.

- Alan Cohen

Passover

A sharing of

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something I embrace
through generations—
My Mother,
Mother’s Mother,
Mother before her, them,
handed down through our bones
our blood.

Tapping into a rich heritage
bonding with the old
creating anew,
I cook, clean,
come together within myself.
An inner expression
shared openly, lovingly
with those in my presence.

Passover is a gift
of history
passed on to you.

Welcome.

- Sherrie Lovler

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

- James Broughton

Seven Stanzas at Easter


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike

Pentecost


Passover and Easter: two moon linked sisters

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who long ago stopped speaking to one another:
linked to the fullness in our hearts
and the fullness of God’s grace.
The moon of Sister Miriam desires freedom –
to rescue her people from the cruelty of Pharaoh,
by the outstretched, mighty hand of Hashem:
a hand of salvation reaching down from heaven,
and passing through my nation,
and down through yours,
and then to each and every one of us – so may it be!
The moon of Mother Mary desires to give her light
so that each man and woman might know
the power of the resurrection,
and the soil of death that holds the seeds of rebirth within:
a resurrection reaching upward,
passing through all nations and up to God Almighty!
Two celebrations: two women: Miriam and Mary,
who don’t even know they have the same name –
one in Hebrew and one in Greek –
yet inexorably linked to a single full moon.
And then we each begin to count:
we both count to fifty –
beyond the forty days of Moses on Mt. Sinai
and Jesus in the wilderness.
We go beyond, one cycle further:
to fifty, Shavuot, the Pentecost.
Ours to the revelation of Torah at Sinai.
Yours to the revelation of the Holy Spirit.
Freedom and resurrection. Revelation and revelation.
Twelve tribes and twelve disciples.
One moon, two traditions.
Two covenants, One God.
Shavuot and Pentecost: two cousins
who have just begun to speak.
And King David is singing to us
from his tomb today:
“Teach us to count our days
that we may open our hearts to Your Wisdom.”
Some of us, thank God, are listening!

- Rabbi David Zaslow

Litany

For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they are dreamed and are dead.
from Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”

Enough to know.
They are dreamed.
And are dead.
The litany in my head
Utters their names
One by one.
Dead. Not dead.
Dreamed.
The beginning. Kneel down
On the cold stone floor.
The stone of the heart recalls first
Her name. Mary. The Grandmother,
The grandmother from Wales
Whose voice always took me to the lilt
Of Dylan Thomas.
Then the children: Marietta Walker,
First child of the young bride.
Donald, after her husband,
Who worked in the mine.
Carrie. Bill. Sam. Norval.
The family grew, boys
Following their father
Into the coal-dark days.
The child Kenneth,
The only one never to reach adulthood,
Adored by my mother, Maggie May.
(Maggie May, Margeret, Midge—
Alll names worn by my mother.)
And the youngest: Betty (Mary Elizabeth).
Elbert. Lucy Florence. Robert.
Twelve children and never an angry word
From the parents from Wales, from Scotland.
But the names go on. Chidren
Of their children. Cousins. Brothers.
My knees, on that ancient stone
Known to my memory, have no feeling.
Only telling.
The names
Come faster.
They are hard to say.
And now, in silence,
The stone. My heart. My love.
Say it.
Enough to know.
Dreamed.
And dead.

- Fran Claggett

Riddle



We do not recognize the body

Of Emmett Till. We do not know

The boy’s name nor the sound

Of his mother wailing. We have

Never heard a mother wailing.

We do not know the history

Of ourselves in this nation. We

Do not know the history of our

Selves on this planet because

We do not have to know

What we believe we own. We believe

We own your bodies but have no

Use for your tears. We destroy

The body that refuses use. We use

Maps we did not draw. We see

A sea so cross it. We see a moon

So land there. We love land so

Long as we can take it. Shhh. We

Can’t take that sound. What is

A mother wailing? We do not

Recognize music until we can

Sell it. We sell what cannot be

Bought. We buy silence. Let us

Help you. How much does it cost

To hold your breath underwater?

Wait. Wait. What are we? What?

What? What on Earth are we?


- Jericho Brown

The Formula

I'm going to let you in
On a secret: You’re not alone
Looking for the one, right way
The way where no mistake
Is possible, the place
Of no loss, no deluge
On the wedding day, no lies
Or rumors about one’s love life,
No anger, no sirens on a quiet
Night. Not the only one convinced
There is a right way.

Here's some suggestions we’ve followed:
Think positively, hold your hands
Just so. Arrange the room facing east.
Breathe. Exercise.
Speak your truth. Listen with
Intention. All this: a guarantee no
Disappointment will visit
And you’ll have what you want.

But what if it's all here? As is.
The mother's death, the best
Friend's decline, the son’s
Deceit and the day the snow
Fell silent in a picture-book
German park and you were in
no hurry.

- Rebecca del Rio

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

- Billy Collins

One Robe, One Bowl

My Life may appear melancholy,
But traveling through this world
I have entrusted myself to heaven.
In my sack, three sho of rice;
By the hearth, a bundle of firewood.
If someone asks what is the mark of enlightenment
or illusion,
I cannot say "wealth and honor are nothing but dust."
As the evening rain falls I sit in my hermitage
And stretch out both feet in answer.

If you speak delusions, everything becomes a delusion;
If you speak the truth, everything becomes the truth.
Outside the truth there is no delusion,
But outside delusion there is no special truth.
Followers of Buddha's Way!
Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your hearts.

- Ryokan
(translated by John Stevens)

Five Precepts On Happiness

1

Though your friends and family
will likely try
to save you from it,
yours is nobody else’s
business or responsibility.

2

You cannot cause,
manufacture or manipulate it.
It comes, if at all,
as gift to be received
with gratitude.

3

Hope to receive it
and prepare by giving away
what you least want to lose.
On this point
Jesus and Buddha dance.

4

Refuse to carry the burden
of maintaining it.
That’s unnecessary baggage,
will betroth you
to a boulder and a hill.

5

If you receive some,
scatter it like seed.
Sharing assures preservation.
As with manna,
held tight, it rots.

- Bonnie Thurston

Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
- William Carlos Williams

The Call

Women in black picked up their violins
To play, backs turned to the mirror.
The wind died as it does on the best days
To hear better their dark music.
But almost at once, seized by a vast amnesia,
The violins slumped in the women’s arms
Like naked children fallen asleep
Among the trees.
Nothing it seemed could ever again stir
The motionless bows, the violins of marble,
And it was then that in the depths of sleep
Someone breathed to me: “You alone can do it,
Come immediately.”

- Jules Supervielle
(translated by Geoffrey Gardner)

Benediction

Dreaming in the last land of dementia,
Torso stiff, limbs frozen,
Steve kneeling by your side
Arranging long now unbending legs
Into the chair Mimi chose
To hold inarticulate love,
Your rigid arm reached out in blessing.
Three times you touched his head.
“Son", you said.

- Ruah Bull

The Last Dog In The World

The last dog in the world

stands outside the dismantled city

A forest of buildings falls down
inside him. When he sleeps

he dreams of forests, but awake
he can’t remember leaves

or the soft sound
that floated down from above
preceding the beneficial
manifestation of food.

Or who it was
who was always
with him.

The last dog in the world
is afraid to regard his tail.

Can’t smell the earth anymore

since all scents left by other
have evaporated. And all
others have evaporated.

For these reasons it’s difficult

for the last dog
to travel anywhere.

Instead he curls up in the corner
of a former gas station, under a pile

of leaflets declaring the End
of the World. Or under the other

leaflets arguing that
The World Will Go On, the world
will always go on. The first

pile of leaflets, apparently,
has won. But the dog doesn’t
know this. What’s paper to him, anyway?

What are days? Just him and
the left-over spiders.
Him and the rusted hinges
and oil refineries and cars stopped

in their tracks on the empty
highways.

How long can a last dog
live like this? The world goes

on and on.

- Sarah Messer

In Black
(written when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003)

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs), I put on black.

I folded away red, yellow, rage, and
Hope. I tucked greens, blues, anticipation
And desire in a neat corner
And I put on black.

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs) I stacked olive, tan,
Quietude and rest in the cabinet.
And I put on black.

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs) I watched orange
Shower up in spectacular sparks like
A desert bonfire. I put away my scarves, silver bracelets,
Amulets and laughter.
And I put on black.

The day they started bombing (they, not we
Because we do not have bombs,) I felt
The air being sucked out of me
In great gulps of teal, fuchsia, pained
Shades of purple. I felt the air wheeling over as
I put on black.

The day we started bombing (we because no matter
How I refused, they used my name anyway)
I folded up joy, like a Bedouins tent, bright,
Fringed and billowing and put on black.


- Rebecca del Rio

Turn your words prophet


Take your words prophet and turn them
to seed
press them
into the palm
of the earth
give each one
a finger of light
let them rest
as long as they need

Take your words prophet and turn them
to softly falling rain
on the Sierra Nevadas
send them
rushing down
dusty valleys
filling dry wells
and parched imaginations

Take you words prophet and turn them
to music
join the love song
of the phoenix
strike fire from
the heart of man*
till the last notes
fade in a trail of smoke

Take your words prophet and turn them
to ears
listen, listen now
to the human
mind feeling
its way back
to the body

Take your words prophet and
let them hang
in the wind
blowing this way
and that
clean white
sheets on a line

Take your silence prophet and throw it
wildly
to the end
of time
leaving nothing
but the echo
of breaking
waves


*’Music should strike fire from the heart of man,…………..…’ Ludwig van Beethoven

- Rachel Parry

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

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You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

Clichés of Our Times

I am not so blessed or so not blessed, being a lapsed
Unitarian who believes only in oaks and sunlight,
nor am I honored, a once-bright thought now sunk
into meaninglessness on everyone’s lips, one of so many


clichés of our times, and I certainly don’t deserve anything,
good or bad, a ridiculous notion, as if we could bend fate
in our own hands. What happens is merely what happens.
We manufacture the stories after, to make proper sense


of the random world, but they confer blame on the innocent,
by and large they serve us ill. All that counts in the end
is practice, letting whatever come closer in, sitting beside
those trusted friends: the delightful and the unacceptable,


busted fan belt in evening traffic, the diagnosis, that sudden,
unexpected, dreamed-of poetry prize, the lottery win.

- Molly Fisk

The Damnedest Finest Ruins



Put me somewhere west of East Street where there's nothin' left but dust,

Where the lads are all a hustlin' and where everything's gone bust,

Where the buildin's that are standin' sort of blink and blindly stare

At the damndest finest ruins ever gazed on anywhere.


Bully ruins - bricks and wall - through the night I've heard you call

Sort of sorry for each other cause you had to burn and fall.

From the Ferries to Van Ness you're a God-forsaken mess,

But the damndest finest ruins - nothin' more or nothin' less.


The strangers who come rubberin' and a huntin' souvenirs,

The fools they try to tell us it will take a million years

Before we can get started, so why don't we come and live

And build our homes and factories upon land they've got to give.


"Got to give"! why, on my soul, I would rather bore a hole

And live right in the ashes than even move to Oakland's mole,

If they'd all give me my pick of their buildin's proud and slick

In the damndest finest ruins still I'd rather be a brick!

- L. W. Harris
(After the San Francisco earthquake April 18, 1906)

My father's family lived in San Francisco when the earthquake struck; my grandfather ran a bar on Union and Laguna Streets in Cow Hollow. Not long after the quake, while the fire was gathering strength,a rumor began to circulate that the entire San Francisco peninsula was going to sink into the ocean. That was enough for the Jacopettis; they loaded up their horse and wagon and headed for the Ferry Terminal. Upon arriving, they found the last ferry was full, so my grandfather bribed the ticket sellers and got on board. They reached Oakland, and camped in the hills along with many other San Franciscans and watched the fire, which appeared to be engulfing the entire city.

Many years later, thinking of the Quake and Fire in '06 and my father being born in '07, I asked him if he had possibly been conceived at the camp in the Oakland hills. He smiled, appearing a little embarrassed, and said, "Well, that's what they always used to tell me."

I grew up in San Francisco 1938 (2 years old when we moved from Beach Street in the Marina to Green and Laguna, one block above Granpa's tavern [he subsequently had a bar and restaurant at #1 Columbus Avenue, in North Beach.]) to 1955, when I left home to seek fun and adventure (found quite a bit of both.) That Green and Laguna house, by the way, was built in 1891, and survived the catastrophe.

Roland

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Damnedest Finest Ruins
...

(After the San Francisco earthquake April 18, 1906)

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In The Absence Of Bliss

Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv

The roasting alive of rabbis
in the ardor of the Crusades
went unremarked in Europe from
the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,
open without prerequisite
when I was an undergraduate.

While reciting the Sh’ma in full
expectation that their souls
would waft up to the bosom
of the Almighty the rabbis burned,
pious past the humming extremes
of pain. And their loved ones with them.
Whole communities tortured and set aflame
in Christ’s name
while chanting Hear, O Israel.

Why?
Why couldn’t the rabbis recant,
kiss the Cross, pretend?
Is God so simple that He can’t
sort out real from sham?
Did He want
these fanatic autos-da-fé, admire
the eyeballs popping,
the corpses shrinking in the fire?

We live in an orderly
universe of discoverable laws,
writes an intelligent alumna
in Harvard Magazine.
Bliss is belief,
agnostics always say
a little condescendingly
as befits mandarins who function
on a higher moral plane.

Consider our contemporary
Muslim kamikazes
hurling their explosives-
packed trucks through barriers.
Isn’t it all the same?
They too die cherishing the fond
certitude of a better life beyond.

We walk away from twenty-two
graphic centuries of kill-the-jew
and hail, of all things, a Mercedes
taxi. The driver is Yemeni,
loves rock music and hangs
each son’s picture—three so far—
on tassels from his rearview mirror.

I do not tell him that in Yemen
Jewish men, like women, were forbidden
to ride their donkeys astride,
having just seen this humiliation
illustrated on the Museum screen.

When his parents came
to the Promised Land, they entered
the belly of an enormous
silver bird, not knowing whether
they would live or die.
No matter. As it was written,
the Messiah had drawn nigh.

I do not ask, who tied
the leaping ram inside the thicket?
Who polished, then blighted the apple?
Who loosed pigs in the Temple,
set tribe against tribe
and nailed man in His pocket?

But ask myself, what would
I die for and reciting what?
Not for Yahweh, Allah, Christ,
those patriarchal fists
in the face. But would
I die to save a child?
Rescue my lover? Would
I run into the fiery barn
to release animals,
singed and panicked, from their stalls?

Bliss is belief, but where’s
the higher moral plane I roost on?
This narrow plank given to splinters.
No answers. Only questions.

- Maxine Kumin

I Don't Miss It

But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

- Tracy K. Smith
(Tracy K. Smith is the United States Poet Laureate)

Love This Miraculous World

Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.

- Wendell Berry

I have a propensity for adding images to poems, please don't be annoyed.
The photo background image is by: André Kértesz

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

- Dylan Thomas

Diving into the Wreck


1.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

2.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

3.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

4.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

5.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenelated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.


6.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

7.

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

- Adrienne Rich

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

- Yehuda Amichai


(Translation by Chana Bloch, in This Same Sky, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye)

The Carmel River

The Carmel is a lovely little river.
It isn’t very long
but in its course
it has everything a river should have.

It rises in the mountains,
and tumbles down a while,
runs through shallows,
is dammed to make a lake,

spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders,
wanders lazily under sycamores,
spills into pools where trout live,
drops in against banks where crayfish live.

In the winter it becomes a torrent,
a mean little fierce river,
and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in
and for fishermen to wander in.

Frogs blink from its banks
and the deep ferns grow beside it.

Deer and foxes come to drink from it,
secretly in the morning and evening,
and now and then a mountain lion
crouched flat laps its water.

The farms of the rich little valley
back up to the river
and take its water
for the orchards and the vegetables.

The quail call beside it
and the wild doves
come whistling in at dusk.
Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs.

It’s everything a river should be.

- John Steinbeck
(From “Cannery Row”)

earthworm


they intertwine our loving with our death,
these earthworms mating with both sides of love.
a gentle rain has coaxed them here above
their buried realm. they squirm in pungent breath
of earthen, dark decay. they take their time.
they hold affection long as if too sweet
to rush. when their endearment is complete,
i blush to see them ease through leaf and grime—
it’s not for science that i watch, but joy.
these wizards of fertility for dirt
are connoisseurs of sex as well as rot.
while mending blessed humus we destroy,
they might become a meal for snake or bird
and teach profound acceptance of our lot.

- Sandy Eastoak

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The Horse

I cannot leave the image of the horse in the water,
the horse thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean
on a moonlit night, the horse following

the slow-moving ship, eyes fixed
on that only other object on the water. It did not
ask to come. It did not willingly leave

the field where it ran, its mane rising up in waves
with each step. It did not like the stinging
in its eyes. The taste of salt no longer

brought pleasure. Its nostrils flared and its body
grew heavier. Around it, long after the ship disappeared,
circles were reaching in every direction, one outside the other.


- Matthew J. Spireng

The sad word here is 'thrown'.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Horse

I cannot leave the image of the horse in the water,
the horse thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean
on a moonlit night, the horse following...

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Extra, Extra

All hail the yellow flag of spring waving on the earth,
the fields striking light against the bell of the sky
in one triumphant peal announcing revolution.
Sing hail to the marching band in its rows of thousands,
hail to the buds on the branches like droplets of milk
about to bloom in a cup of black tea. Hail breakfast.

All praise to weeds, to fennel, thistle, miner's lettuce,
to foxtail and rattlesnake grass, horseradish, duckweed,
to moss and lichen, to goldenback fern. Praise outlaws.
Praise their persistence and their disregard for safety,
the way they pass through fences as if through open doors.
Praise to the uncountable numbers of their beauty.

And thanks for nothing. Thank you for this embarrassment
of useless gifts, this bright paper covering the box
of earth. Thank you for the fecund grave, the open mouth
of the river in constant, irresponsible flood.
Thanks for all that goes to waste, unasked for, unwanted:
this love, in such profusion, that does not care for us.

- Yosha Bourgea

the new world

in the hot months
the maps are singing
of places beyond the everyday


and I see
Columbus
packing his bags with hopes
and diseases
leaving for a world
that he didn’t want to find

how often we’ve headed
for the new world
finding everything
the maps had promised:
a plotted landscape
a measured sea

these maps have made the world flat
do not use them

they can show us
all there is
but there are no roads
to where we have to go

- Lynn Mally

What I Teach 3rd Graders

I teach how to shake hands
and raise hands
and clap hands
to appreciate.
How to listen
how to wait
how to hold a pencil
(not a gun).

I teach that every sentence
has a subject
(The man)
and a predicate
(is shooting children)
and some have a prepositional phrase
(in their classroom.)
I teach them to pause
at a comma, to stop
at a period
and a ? means you are asking
(Why? Why? Why?)

I teach them to multiply
legs on dogs
fingers on hands
(not shootings in schools),
and how in subtraction you start
with the bigger number
and when you’re done taking away
you have less.
(17 less in Parkdale, 15 less in Columbine, 27 less in Sandy Hook.)

I teach about places
(unmarred
by children murdered at school),
the lives of people
who have made a difference
(not a massacre),
how water can be absorbed
or repelled
(like blood on linoleum)
and that some words, like repel,
mean more than one thing.

I teach them to walk quietly
in a line when the fire alarm sounds,
to duck and cover
until the earth stops shaking,
and to lay on the floor
(like fish in a barrel)
if a bad man comes.

What I don’t tell them
is in that hellish haze
of gunfire and screams
I plan to toss them like ragdolls
behind bookshelves,
stack them like cordwood
behind cubbies,
that my only calculation
will be how many can I save,
how many will I leave to die?

So when I rescue
a spider from the sink
scoop it into a paper cup
set it down among green leaves,
they breathe as one, relieved,
because I’ve taught them
it’s wrong to kill
small creatures.

- Lisa Shulman

In The Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well things
Lean on each other, how the bees work,
The fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high, then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
Changing, what has no head or arms
Or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
Caught on this earth, visit
The old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
Be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
Whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

- Robert Bly

(Slusser Rd. off of River Rd. —Fall of 2017)

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

In The Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well things
Lean on each other, how the bees work,
The fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high, then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
Changing, what has no head or arms
Or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
Caught on this earth, visit
The old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
Be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
Whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

- Robert Bly

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