Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

- Robert E. Hayden

Summer Holiday

When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of
bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-
ered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains
will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the
mountain…

- Robinson Jeffers

Ghazal: America the Beautiful

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America

The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America

We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America

Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America

We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

- Alicia Ostriker

Pity The Nation
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose
sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully
as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by
torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but
its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation--oh, pity the people who allow
their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

Early Retirement


or more generally
Reboot


For far too long now
I have been running
I want to stand
still
I want to listen

I want to set aside
the troubles of this world
and go into the other world
deep within

where silence is welcome
where life is not manufactured
and sold through advertising
where there is no business model

where joy has room to breathe
where love governs the land
where I can hear
and rediscover myself

moment by moment
with no deadline
fully open to endings
fully open to new beginnings

- Jean-Pierre Swennen

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

- Donald Hall
(September 20, 1928 - June 23, 2018)

Background image is a section of a Randall Exon painting.

Donald Hall

I came to you late, quite by accident,
in the car, that Saturday afternoon
after a seemingly endless detour—
decades stretching into decades—

brought me back, in the end,
to myself and to the poetry
that I had so loved
as a young man.

- Bill Denham

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

Caged Bird

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...9_14-56-12.png

A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

- Maya Angelou

Red Brocade

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

July

Deep pools of shade beneath dense maples,
the dapples as delicious as lemon drops_
textures of childhood, and its many flavors!
The gratefulness of cool, the bottles of
sarsaparilla and iodine-red cream soda
schooled like fish, on their sides,
in the watery ice of the zinc-lined cooler
in the shade of the cherry trees
planted by the town baseball diamond,
where only the grown-ups cared what the score was
and the mailman took his ups with a grunt
that made the crowd in its shirtsleeves laugh.
The sun kindled freckles like a match
touching straw, and beneath a tree
a quality reigned like the sound of a gong,
solemn and sticky and calm. Then the grass
bared the hurry of ants, and each blade
bent to some weight, some faint godly tread
we could not see. The dapples
were not holes in the shade but like pies,
bulging up, and air tasted of water,
and water of metal, and metal of what
would never come_real change, removal
from this island of stagnant summer,
the end of sarsaparilla and its hint
of licorice taste, of sassafras twig,
of things we chewed with the cunning of Indians,
to whom all trees had souls, the maples no more
like birches than clouds are like waterfalls.
The dying grass smelled especially sweet
where sneakers had packed it flat,
or out of the way, in the playground corner,
where the sun had forgot to stop shining.
this was the apogee, July, a month
like the piece of a dome where it flattens
and reflects in a smear high above us,
the ant-children busy and lazy below.

- John Updike

By Way of Explanation

There is -
I suppose -
a bit of
Madagascar
in me
I never mention.

And somehow
Amazons
have escaped
your rapt
attention.

The nose
is strictly
Egypt
for your
information.

The heart
a cruel
white circle -
pure Bengali.

Here are the knees
you claim are yours—
devout Moroccans.

The breasts
to your surprise,
Gauguin's Papeete.

Pale moon of belly -
Andalusian!

The hands -
twin comedies
from Pago Pago.

The eyes -
bituminous
Tierra del Fuego.

Odd womb.
Embalmed.
Quintana Roo.

- Sandra Cisneros

Independence Day Revised

Manchester by the Sea
History papered with the Stars
and Stripes

some the size of a one story home
The story known by heart
here in this cradle of liberty

Red, White and
Blue with memories of what we took
for granted

Commercialism and a day off
blunt the message.
How do you like your burger?

Everywhere the sound of small
marching bands and waving flags
Rat a tat tat The snare will not be denied

And when are the fireworks
those bright perseids seemingly from
another constellation?

Then as if a reminder of the sacrifices
made... the latest casualty

news of a young man who fell
victim to a cherry bomb

Freedom has it’s price
you know.

- Charles Reisch

Suffer The Little Children

Suffer the little children to come to America
Carry the soil of the earth with you little child
Hold it in your small hand and say
Give me asylum give me a home.
The child in me tormented in their torment
Forced to witness the horror
Behind bars inside cages.
The unmerciful greed
The unholy massacre of love
Cannibalizing this good earth
These good children
These terrorized people
Running for their lives
Into the slathering jaws
At the border of my country.
My America tis of thee
They come because they heard the
Bell of freedom ringing because
They saw a light burning away the
Darkness- through tears through
The anguish of our immigrant ancestors.
They are coming in their suffering
The once noble bells still ring
The once open hearts still are here
My America o beautiful
Do not turn your back

Hold out your hands

- Gail Onion

An Ode To Yeats



I suppose that’s one reason for death

To take the I out of its sentence,

To relinquish the body and the breath

To extinguish a rhymer’s repentance,

An association to a poem of Lawrence

A keen fixation with the rhyme scheme

My hoping to be reborn Irish dream

To thrill in the lilting stream of Her voice.

The utter certainty that an old man’s hot blood

Will insure the dawn’s passion is anything but cold;

Such assurance at death’s expense be it told

The young men clamoured for that poet of old.




- Brian McSweeney

All That Remains

Every atom of matter is shot through with love
but only the lover can see
“a universe aflame”

It gradually becomes a matter
of every waking moment.
the mind can be busy
with ceaseless thoughts
the feet engaged
in a thousand tasks.

But every hour, every day
the loving breath
is breathing it
the beating heart
is speaking it.

It is the slipping away of self
until all that remains is walking
in old shoes and loving
the little breath that gives life
to this happy shell of a self.

- Norah Schreiber

City Psalm

The killings continue, each second
pain and misfortune extend themselves
in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly,
and the air bears the dust of decayed hopes,
yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged
pavements among crippled llives, jackhammers
raging, a parking lot painfully agleam in the May sun,
I have seen not behind but within,
within the dull grief, blown grit,
hideous concrete façades, another grief,
a gleam as of dew, an abode of mercy,
have heard not behind but within noise
a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.
Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue;
not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blesséd, that was bliss,
I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

- Denise Levertov

A Great Rose Tree

This is the day and the year
of the rose. The whole garden

is opening with laughter. Iris
whispering to cypress. The rose

is the joy of meeting someone.
The rose is a world imagination

cannot imagine. A messenger from
the orchard where the soul lives.

A small seed that points to a great
rose tree! Hold its hand and walk

like a child. A rose is what grows
from the work the prophets do.

Full moon, new moon. Accept the
invitation spring extends, four

birds flying toward a master. A rose
is all these, and the silence that

closes and sits in the shade, a bud.

- Jelalludin Rumi
(Ghazal (Ode) 1348
Version by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin)

Flare


When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or not.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

- Mary Oliver

Top right image taken from Peruvian Nasca hummingbird line.

Pi


The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.


- Wisława Szymborska

On Hold

What finally got to me
were the children
separated from their parents because, “children
can’t follow their parents to jail.”
To jail for what?
For not wanting to be murdered,
raped, tortured?
I respond to the appeal
to send clothes for the children
to the justice (misnomer) department.
Maybe thousands of items of clothing
will arrive from the outpouring of
human hearts.

Having the luxury of too much hot water,
my favorite sweater just shrunk
when I washed it.
Now it will fit a young one, a crying one,
to keep her warm in camp
if her crying doesn’t raise her temperature enough,
if her heart is cold and empty
without her mother,
if hundreds of other crying children
can’t protect her from the cold.

I want to send it anonymously
since my letter inside is unkind and I don’t
trust what lists are being created.
I learn you cannot put first class stamps
on a priority mail package
and UPS wants my name and
I can’t just leave a box at the post office
that’s over 13 ounces.

So it’s on hold.
I go back to signing petitions.
I go back to my safe life.
Yes, I will send the sweater
when I return from vacation.
When it’s convenient.
And I think of the crying children and I hope
someone does something soon.
Maybe I’ll post a note on Facebook
and some else will send clothes instead.

- Sherrie Lovler

O, Pilgrim!

O pilgrim, where have you been?
Where are you now?

While you have been searching the world
the Beloved has been here all along
waiting for you.

Let the caravan carry you home
to your deepest heart’s desire.
The treasure you sought was buried in your own garden.

Come home, o wanderer, and behold the face in the mirror.
Look behind the eyes and see the One
who has been searching for you.

You are seen;
you are known
and you are beloved.

If your seeking has brought you here at last,
you know that there is nowhere else to go
and nothing more to say.

- Jellaludin Rumi
(version by Larry Robinson)
___________________________

A LITTLE STORY ABOUT AN ANCIENT CHINESE EMPEROR

Thousands of years ago in ancient China a boy emperor ruled for awhile.
The Imperial Court had placed the child on the throne so that he could be
a mouthpiece for the Imperial Court's desires.

Coddled from birth, surrounded by servants and sycophants,
told by The Imperial Court that he was The Son of Heaven,
given to believe he had no obligation to anyone but his Imperial Court,
pampered and protected from any notion of what the real world was like,
from any idea of what The People had to put up with every day,

The Emperor stomped and swaggered through the world
telling The People what to do, taking whatever he wanted,
robbing from the poor and giving to the rich, and sending
his armies out to terrorize whomever he took a notion to despise.

The Emperor ruled for a long time and thousands of The People
died, killed by his armies and because of his abuse and neglect.
But, eventually, after great suffering, The People rose up and
crushed the man who called himself The Son of Heaven.
And they crushed his Imperial Court as well.

Then some time passed in which The People lived in relative calm
until another Emperor, like the one in this story, came along.

- David Budbill

A Man's A Man for A' That

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

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

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

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

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

- Robert Burns

Ashes Among the Remains

My father responded
Just throw them away
I did not nor did I cast them into
ocean or bay where we’d fished
flounder and fluke nor strew them
over the golf courses where he’d hit
multistage rockets rising from half an inch
then to a foot above fairways
to summarily explode
hundreds of yards into the future
other worldly fireworks released
by his elegantly compact fury.
Instead I left them in their box
a golden shiny tin ossuary
next to my mother’s on the top shelf
of my bedroom closet
where I did not have to make decisions
and I incidentally could visit them daily
until our house burned down
in the California wildfires
October Ninth 2017
I don’t intend here to dwell upon
the nightmare that fire is
I will not detail the feelings we had
as we evacuated in one of our cars
along with the family terrier and nothing else
though later we did contemplate
Dad’s and Mom’s remains further
consumed by 1500 degree flames
extending their years-earlier incineration
in an oven at the crematorium near Petaluma.
Were it not that my parents lived well into
their nineties I so sick depressed and barely 74
might feel prepared to let go of the tangible rim
to the bottomless jar of all that remains
to the what or the where or the not.

- Ed Coletti

Left-Handed Pitcher Working on a Scaffold

I am a failed state,

about to crack my backbone
while still young
enough to fire smoke
95 MPH.

Herodotus abridged
and a bag of salted nuts
fall like lethal acorns
shaken free from my back pocket

Remember my torn mitt once autographed by Whitey Ford,
three no hitters in Catholic school.
Was I the greatest?

Sun contradicts breeze.
Soapy squeegee scrapes my skin.
Wind picks up.
Belt cracks; a universe unfastening
symmetry as I unfold.

Somersaulting,
time slithers,
clichés ring,
historical antecedents drop like parachutes
behind enemy lines.

Before crashing, I spot autumn
gardens on rooftops,
helicopters like dragon flies overhead,
a peregrine falcon
circling.

If only I were a bird,
not ineffective like Icarus
flapping my melting wings
at cloud formations.

Absence is my future.
Dad smoldered
when I read the Odyssey
in the locker room
after blowing a game in the ninth.

Given a better ERA
I’d never have taken a job
in the sky.

Dad, if you hadn’t craved a superstar,
cash bonus to boot; if you hadn’t drilled me
daily with burning hot grounders
off varnished baseball bats,
I’d have studied physics or mythology
instead of screwballs and sliders.

If my arms were shorter than ostrich gams,
the flame on my fastball would never
have held steady as a gelding’s canter —
granting me years to emerge whole
before turning
old.

- Barry Denny

rite


working with willow rods that’s the method, bring great bundles of them,
put on the ground scatter them pronounce them, saying:

“here’s one”
“here’s another one”
“here’s one, there . . . over there . . .”

willow rods, very consoling we’ll clear the ground you don’t have to be a Scythian . . .
and then the ones behaving more like women use a different method they take a piece of the inner bark of a lime tree
cut it into many pieces
which they keep twisting and untwisting around their fingers as they make effigies of themselves, willow rods of women saying:

“there’s a turn” “there’s a turning” “there’s a rowdy one” “there’s a moist one”

“there’s one we lost to negligent wind” “another one burned up”
“one folded down a sparrow’s cheek” “how many turnings in a twisty one?”

a million, more than you can ever hold makes the pronouncers happy surveyors of tractor and sage
and when all goes out

remember eclipse telling you this could all go out women too? women go out?

but for love & mystery willows rods, willows rods you know this, women
to fool the hearts of men

staying up all night, notice the moon and its macabre signal and hemp vapor tents on the horizon
walk upside down in the footprints of the living

- Anne Waldman

The Voice of the Turtle

And the voice of the turtle
shall be heard in the land

Oh, I know it means the turtle dove
I know that now, but I didn’t then
when I was eight years old

My imagination ran wild

I had only seen one turtle close up
one of those dime store turtles
no bigger than a quarter
that you bought for twenty cents in June
that lived almost a month
in a pan on the back porch
with three pebbles and a flat rock
for company and comfort

If you were lucky
it would live ‘till fall
then your heart would break
when your Dad carried it away
to an uncertain end

My turtle never sang
and it was not that I didn’t listen
Maybe he only sang at sunrise
I tried that only once and not a peep

A dead fly didn’t send his
turtle heart to singing either
no sound escaped his hawky jaw
as he chomped an iridescent wing

Fresh water, a lettuce leaf
even a bug I didn’t know
left him uninspired and mute

I listened so hard for that turtle’s voice
maybe my ears were too small or too big
maybe he was too young to sing or
just maybe he had nothing to sing about
in his chipped enamel pan

I heard others singing though
grey wrens in the cherry tree
Dad as he pruned the tomatoes
even the dog groaning content
in the shade under the porch

And the voice of the turtle
shall be heard in the land

Maybe we were both too young
he to sing it and me to hear
what still must be a glorious sound
to the ear

Another time, another place

Perhaps some other turtle
in some other land
is singing a great low note to God

Some other turtle I guess
in some other land

- Doug von Koss

Paragee of a Summer Full Moon

Confused and enchanted the mockingbird
Sings all night and again, all day, while
The moon too bright, too big to contain herself
Smears her light like luminous jelly,
Across the welcoming, wide awake sky.

- Rebecca del Rio

thanks for posting but moonlight smeared like luminous jelly makes me throw up a little in my mouth...

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Paragee of a Summer Full Moon

Confused and enchanted the mockingbird
Sings all night and again, all day, while
The moon too bright, too big to contain herself
Smears her light like luminous jelly,
Across the welcoming, wide awake sky.

- Rebecca del Rio

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I think that should be "perigee," Larry. Not to be too nit-picky or anything. Also, are the punctuation lapses in the poems you quote intentional or just typos? I've often wondered. In any event keep 'em coming, please! :-)

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Paragee of a Summer Full Moon

Confused and enchanted the mockingbird
Sings all night and again, all day, while
The moon too bright, too big to contain herself
Smears her light like luminous jelly,
Across the welcoming, wide awake sky.

- Rebecca del Rio

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Set This Book On Fire!

Rising
in the glow of the embers,
and even in the ashes, I want to tell you:
I’ve spent years
studying stark cries in the cancerous marrow
of inner-city streets. I’ve gone to
Uppidee districts to witness poets
who kiss their asses while adjusting grins,
luring audience approval with politically correct quips.
I want to tell you:
don’t lie! If you’re going to read a poem
about a kid getting his head blown off,
don’t raw jaw your cotton-tipped tongue
to gain the sugary aplomb and donut favor
of English Department heads, who like you
and never scavenged food from dumpsters, who like you
and never stood in welfare lines, who like you
while gleaning misery topics from The New York Times.
I want to tell you:
if you’re going to preach what you don’t follow,
testify to what you haven’t lived,
hoola-hoop your way like a pride-plucked hen
doormatting your heart for moneyed admirers
whose concerned faces ohh and ahh faked empathy,
know that poetry deserves better than that
hee-hawing, educated, hillbilly-mule
whinnying for the crowd response.
I want to tell you:
while you do your sheepish, poor-me routine,
your victim-in-distress sighing,
poor people are being murdered,
prisoners are being zapped with fifty-thousand volts
of electricity to make them behave.
O hollow-hearted, New Age activist that you are,
tell us in your poetry how cooly you’ve risked
your life helping refugees cross the border.
I want to tell you:
what you’re looking for is a new title to acclaim,
what you want is to be hailed a savior
when you spice your poetry with theatrics,
crumpling on the floor and groaning with rage.
O how the world has done you wrong!
The last thing we need is more toothless tigers
stalking thousand-dollar checks from sympathetic patrons
of first-class airlines and four-star hotels.
I want to tell you:
I’m weary of these castrated Uppidees,
poets and patrons who’ve hardly engaged in life.
I’m tired of the prejudice they never own,
tired of them spouting off familiar remedies
to a world of ills they’ve never known.
I beg you both, get out of the way,
please step aside, just a couple of steps,
it takes too much effort to go around you.
I want to tell you:
the flashpoint of paper is 451 degrees.

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

Who Knows One

Who knows One. I know One.
One is God for God is One—
The only One in Heaven and on earth.

Who knows two. I know two.
Two are the first two: Adam and Eve.
One is God for God is One—
It takes one to know one.

Who knows three. I know three.
Bad things always come in threes.
Two trees grew in the Garden of Eden.
One is God for God is One—
One rotten apple spoils the barrel.

Who knows four. I know four.
What were you doing on all fours?
Three’s the hearts in a ménage à trois.
Two’s the jump ropes in double Dutch.
One is God for God is One—
One good turn deserves another.

Who knows five. I know five.
Five is the five in “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Four is Egypt’s plague of flies.
Three the Stooges on TV.
Two the two-faced lie he told.
One is God for God is One—
One hand washes the other.

Who knows six. I know six.
Six are the wives of Henry VIII.
Who? What? Where? When? Why?
Four the phases of the moon.
Three the bones inside the ear.
Two eyes—the better to see you with, my dear.
One is God for God is One—
There’s only one to a customer.

Who knows seven. I know seven.
Seven the year of the seven-year itch.
Six the paper anniversary.
Asked if he did it, he pleaded the Fifth.
Four are my absent wisdom teeth.
Three is the three in the third degree.
Two can play that game.
One is God for God is One—
Public Enemy No. 1.

Who knows eight. I know eight.
The Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week.”
Wrath is the seventh of the deadly sins.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
He lost it all in five-card stud.
Four bits in a nibble equals half a byte.
Three is the beginning, middle, and end.
Two are the graves in the family plot.
One is God for God is One—
The only one in a hole in one.

Who knows nine. I know nine.
Nine are the lives of an average cat.
Eight is the day of circumcision.
Seven the locks on Samson’s head.
Six the sense I wish I had.
Five the five in nickeled-and-dimed.
Four cold feet in the double bed.
Three’s a crowd.
Two’s company.
One is God for God is One—
The only one in a one-night stand.

Who knows ten. I know ten.
I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.
She dressed to the nines.
Fellini’s “8½.”
Seven the times the bride circles the groom.
Six the number perfect in itself.
She daubed her wrists with Chanel No. 5.
Love is just a four-letter word.
Three is as phony as a three-dollar bill.
Two is the two in doubletalk.
One is God for God is One—
There’s one born every minute.

Who knows eleven. I know eleven.
Eleven are the stars in Joseph’s dream.
Ten is the Roman numeral X.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Infinity’s a sideways figure eight.
Seven long years Jacob had to wait.
Six is the Lover’s Tarot card.
Five is indivisible.
Four, cruel April.
Three witches in “the Scottish play.”
Two is the two of “I and Thou.”
One is God for God is One—
One in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Who knows twelve. I know twelve.
Twelve are the face cards in a deck.
Eleven are the thieves in “Ocean’s Eleven.”
Take a deep breath and count to ten.
It takes nine tailors to make a man.
Eight are the people on Noah’s ark.
Seven are the hues in a rainbow’s arc.
Six is . . . I can’t remember what.
Five the rivers of the Underworld.
Four the rivers of Paradise.
Three on a match.
It takes two to tango.
One is God for God is One—
In one ear and out the other.

Who knows thirteen. I know thirteen.
Thirteen is the skyscraper’s missing floor.
Twelve are the men who walked on the moon.
At the eleventh hour, his life was spared.
Do not covet your neighbor’s ass.
Nine are the circles of Dante’s Hell.
Eight is the game of crazy eights.
The phone was busy 24/7.
They deep-sixed their love affair.
The five-o’clock shadow on your face.
Four is putting two and two together.
Three is the eternal triangle.
Two plays second fiddle.
Two minus one equals one.
One is one all alone.
You were my one and only one—
The only one whose number’s up.

- Jane Shore

You cannot by willing it alter the vast world outside of you.
You cannot strike the handcuffs from one chained hand.
You cannot cut the lash from one whip.
You cannot even remake your own soul so that there shall be no inclination
to evil in it.
The great world rolls on, and you can do nothing to change it.
But this one thing you can do: in that one, small, minute, almost infinitesimal
place in the universe where you stand—there, where as God, your will prevails,
strive to make what you hunger for real.

- Howard Thurman

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

- Billy Collins

Watching the Jet Planes Dive

We must go back and find a trail on the ground
back of the forest and mountain on the slow land;
we must begin to circle on the intricate sod.
By such wild beginnings without help we may find
the small trail on through the buffalo-bean vines.

We must go back with noses and the palms of our hands,
and climb over the map in far places, everywhere,
and lie down whenever there is doubt and sleep there.
If roads are unconnected we must make a path,
no matter how far it is, or how lowly we arrive.

We must find something forgotten by everyone alive,
and make some fabulous gesture when the sun goes down
as they do by custom in little Mexican towns
where they crawl for some ritual up a rocky steep.
The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.


- William Stafford

We

(After June Jordan’s – “A Poem for South African Women”)


“We are the ones we been waiting for”

Just listen to yourselves and we will wait no more

No need for another Malcolm or Martin

When you stand ready at the door of greatness

Seeds sewn by Sojourner have now sprouted in her likeness as true

New answers to old questions now lie in the hands of youth

Man or woman in the mirror now serves as your proof

that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for

Challenge is to realize your worth

But not before we understand our birthright to the throne

Our fate is our own

We are the clones of pharaohs and queens

We do not stand alone

We are the people

To end WAR

We Are Responsible

To conclude the long WAIT

We Acknowledge It’s Time - Now

Yes we are the ones we’ve been waiting for you

A community of self

Individuality the wealth that makes the collective unique

New reality that we hold the answers we seek

We need not lean on the crunch

Our government too much overrated

Our concerns too often debated and debated and debated and debated

Yes we are the one we’ve been waiting for

Just listen to yourself and we will wait no more

No need for another Malcolm or Martin

when you stand ready at the door of greatness

Seeds sewn by Sojourner have now sprouted in her likeness as truth

New answers to old questions now lie in the hands of youth

Man or woman in the mirror now serves as your proof

that we are the ones we've been waiting for


– Nathan M. Richardson

The Zen of Housework
I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam -- each a tiny spectrum -- rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly -- like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!

- Al Zolynas

Punishment


They used books as weapons.
This is not a metaphor.
Because there were no blankets and they were cold,
the men in cell block L threw books
with intent to do bodily harm.
They rained down from above.
Rained down from the cells.
Guards shielded themselves
with dinner trays and mop buckets.
The men tossed entire libraries. A rage of books.
Lobbed in high arcs like footballs,
or pitched overhand like grenades.
Hardcovers shattered on cheekbones
or exploded on the back of someone’s head.
Paperbacks spiraled down, loose pages fluttering.
Thin ones skipped across the shiny tile like stones on water.
There was mayhem. There was blood.
Words littered the floor. Guards ran for their lives.
The men had spent years collecting—
biographies, mysteries, histories, science fiction,
even poetry books, their spines fine and reedy,
or thick with free verse.
One man threw his grandmother’s leather Bible.
Inside the front cover in elegant script
she’d noted the date and time of his birth.
Now it lay face down, back broken.
Another man hurled his family album.
It fell from the third floor, the photos scattering
on impact. His wife, his son, his daughter
smiled up from the chaos.

- Nancy Miller Gomez

The Price of Experience

What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house , his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun
And in the vintage and to sing on the wagon loaded with corn

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season
When the red blood is filled with wine and with the marrow of lambs

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;
To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast
To hear the sounds of love in the thunder storm
that destroys our enemies' house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness
that cuts off his children

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door
and our children bring fruit and flowers

Then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten
and the slave grinding at the mill
And the captive in chains and the poor in the prison
and the soldier in the field
When the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me

- William Blake

Back Up Quick, They’re Hippies

That was the year we drove
into the commune in Cornwall.
“Jesus Jim,” mam said,
“back up quick they’re hippies.”

Through the car window,
tents, row after row, flaps open,
long-haired men and women
curled around each other like babies

and the babies themselves
wandered naked across the grass.

I reached for the handle, ready, almost,
to open the door, drop out and away
from my sister’s aggressive thighs,
Daddy’s slapping hands.

Back home in the Dandelion Market
I unlearnt the steps my mother taught,
bought a headband, an afghan coat,
a fringed skirt — leather skin.

Barefoot on common grass I lay down with kin.

- Lani O’Hanlon

Pine Tree Ode

I was sitting on the top stones of a wall—can you
get even closer to the tree, he said, so I went
inches from the trunk of the tallest of the ones
we'd been standing among like small children
among the legs of the grown-ups.
Now, the side of my face was almost
against the bark, intimate,
I could see where its growing had pulled its surface
open, into wooden lozenges, like
stretch marks, I could not feel it breathe
but I felt it alive beside me, a huge
ant running down, and stopping, and turning
its feelers, in the air, between us, and then
walking so fast it seemed to be pouring back
up. Then I looked, up, along
the branchless stem, into the canopy,
to the needles fanning out in bunches
eating the sun. And the length of it seemed like
bravery, like strong will,
a single, whole, note, like a tenor's
cry, sustained, as if a tree were
a spurt from the earth, a heart's gush.
And the ants flowed from ground to sky,
sky to ground. I don't know where the ants
had been, or their ancestors had been, the noon
the tornado came through, wall of water
a hundred and thirty miles an hour,
solid ferocious grey static.
The tree stood. And now I sat up straight
beside it, feeling my way back
through species, and species, toward the pine, and toward
the ones we both descended from, the
fern, the green cell—the sun,
the star-stuff we are made of.

- Sharon Olds

Anything but Standard

It was the two of us, wasn't it, on those steamy nights
circling the low-slung museum across the street
and lingering by the pond behind the chapel.

It's how the southern clouds passed slowly
overhead, season after season, year after year,

as you followed a low intricate scent
across the stately lit lawn,
and studied the squirrels in the live oaks,
and waded into the brown reflecting pool
with the broken obelisk.

You were a descendent of water dogs
and anything but standard
when you materialized out of the sticky heat
with your dripping black forehead
and delinquent grin, a growl unmuzzled.

It was your Russian face that steadied me
as I sat on a battered wooden bench,
lost in a night that wouldn't end,
and you lay down - calm, poised, watchful -
and stirred beside me on the simmering grass.

Let's get up and go.
Trot ahead of me, old friend,
and shake off the watery darkness.

- Edward Hirsch

Beginners

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea -“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
- so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet -
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

- Denise Levertov