Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

- Seamus Heaney

Return

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, can hardly fly.
Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain,
Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.

- Robinson Jeffers

Advice For The Fall Equinox


Walking in balance is not easy —
to step so lightly
the grasses are not bent,
to step so firmly
one’s track points
a way through the thicket.

Indeed it seems our nature to be
off balance,
one foot stepping so lightly
one so firmly
that lost in the desert
we always walk in a circle.

There are worse fates; let us then
learn to walk the circle in joy.
The seasons turn & return
one upon the other
& there is nowhere to go;
the Earth is Home enough;
the walk, all too brief,
leads Nowhere.

To learn to walk in balance
practice the dance.

---

Consejo para el Equinoccio Otoñal


Andar en equilibrio no es fácil —
pisar tan ligeramente
que la hierba no se doble,
pisar tan firmemente
que nuestra huella señale
el camino por la maleza.

En verdad nuestra naturaleza parece
ser sin balance,
un pie pisando tan ligeramente
el otro tan firme
que perdidos en el desierto
siempre caminamos en círculo.

Hay peores destinos; entonces
aprendamos a caminar el círculo en gozo.
Las estaciones voltean y vuelven
y no hay a donde ir;
la Tierra es hogar suficiente;
el camino, demasiado breve,
a nada nos lleva.

Para aprender a andar en balance
practica el baile.

- Rafael Jesús González

Tense Times

Tense times for me,
and sleep’s acting like a newly love-struck teen.
I shall disregard the state my heart’s in
and my mind’s upheavals like water bubbling
past the boiling point.

I am a part of the universe with which the universe is angry,
a part of the earth of which the earth feels utterly ashamed,
a wretched human towards whom
other humans cannot maintain neutrality.

Neutrality: an illusion
like all the graces of which humans speak, so shamelessly theoretical.
Truth is an inadequate term, just like Man,
and love bumps about,
a miserable fly
trapped in a glass box.
Freedom is very relative:
all said and done we live in a ball-shaped prison
barred with ozone.
Set free, our fate
is certain death.

I am incapable of laughing.
Completely incapable of smiling, even.
Incapable, at the same time, of crying.
Incapable of acting like a human being,
which doesn’t upset me in the slightest
though it hurts so
to have a body covered with light down,
to walk on two limbs,
to depend wholly on your mind,
to be drawn after your desires to the furthest point,
to have your freedom trapped,
to have others decide to kill you,
to miss those closest to you
without a chance to say farewell.

What good does Farewell do
but leave a sad impression?
What good’s meeting?
What good’s love?
What good is it to be this alive
while others die from sorrow
over you?

I saw my father for the last time through thick glass
then he departed, for good.
Because of me, let’s say.
Let us say because he could not bear the thought
I’d die before him.
My father died and left death to besiege me
without it frightening me sufficiently.
Why does death scare us to death?
My father departed after a long time
spent on the surface of this planet.
I didn’t say farewell as I should have
nor grieve for him as I should have
and was incapable of tears,
as is my habit, which grows uglier with time.

The soldiers besiege me on all fronts
in uniforms of poor color.
Laws and regimes and statutes besiege me.
Sovereignty besieges me,
a highly concentrated instinct that living creatures cannot shake.
My loneliness besieges me.
My loneliness chokes me.
I am choked by depression, nervousness, worry.
Remorse, that I’m a member of the human race, kills me.
I was unable to say goodbye to all those I love
and who departed, even temporarily.
I was unable to leave a good impression of a last meeting.
Then I yielded to the rifles of longing
leveled my way.
I refused to raise my hand
and became incapacitated.
Then I was bound by sorrow
that failed to force me to tears.

The Knowing gnaws at me from within,
killing every shot I have at survival.
The Knowing is killing me slowly
and it’s much too late for a cure.

- Ashram Fayadh

Fayadh is a Palestinian poet, living in exile in Saudi Arabia. In 2015, he was sentenced to death for cursing against Allah and the prophet Muhammad, insulting Saudi Arabia and distributing a book of his poems that promoted atheism. The above is the first poem he wrote while imprisoned.

Hundreds of leading authors, artists and actors, including the director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, the British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and actor Helen Mirren appealed for his release. More than 60 international arts and human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the writers’ association PEN International, launched a campaign calling on the Saudi authorities and western governments to save him. Readings of his poetry in support of his case took place in 44 countries.

His sentence was later commuted to eight years, 800 lashes and a personal renunciation of his work.

The Ripening

This Living
has softened the hard fruit
of my being

Everyday, tenderness
claims more of me
taking me holy
into ripeness

Let me not
fall from the branch
ripe but untasted

Rather, let the Beloved
pluck me in ripeness
and pierce me with His bite

Releasing the juicy
fullness of my life
to run down His arm
like tears of gratitude,
like tears of devotion

But,
if fall I must
untasted
melting into the earth

Let that nourishing decay
be my devotion
spreading out in a pool
of returning

the essential elements
of my being

- Kay Crista

Pablo Maestro




Neruda
justice is your breath
fearless in knowing
tattooed by the wind
love carved in faith
the poet of poets
your song completed the world


I began with the best
you were the first.
At eleven I found
“Twenty Love Poems
and One Song Of Despair”.
Transmuted by the thoughts you think
with the feelings I felt
I came to be
in flight with your flight
a peace making song of grapes


Nobel man of Nobel Prize
Chilean forever
embracing your wounded land
fixing its broken mouth
tending its tragic de-petalled daisies


You inhabit me
afire
your words dialogue
with my inner wisdom
you know of distant sadness
and in my voice that has humbled itself
into a homeless poem of exile
a searing truth lives where God flames.
Justice finds its place in your hand.
With each of your words we breathe in freedom
and breath out pain.


I was twenty one when
with Carlos Fuentes,
at the New York Hilton
we met in a strange cadence
of slow motion.
Your wife, Matilde, in the background
looked on accustomed to the routine
as I sat beguiled at your feet
amongst many others,
and in my wiser years as a poet
I’ve continued at your feet
still translating into Nerudian
when I don’t want facts
to interfere with truth


Last night, Pablo maestro,
I slept in the same dream as you
a merciful atonement
of making love in a quiet poem
where in each other’s exhiles
we to one another sang


When you were dying
your forever betraying government
cut off your phone from all the world,
as the wood fences from all your homes
bore the packed, scratched tributes
for the humble for whom you sang
to the famous that sang for you


This is a small “song of despair”
as I wash my face with your tears
I again know your rhymes
visionary of hot rhythms
your drum is my heart beat
and your voice is my song!


- Jana Klenburg

Omens

Out here, we read everything as a sign.
The coyote in its scruffed coat,
bending to eat a broken persimmon on the ground.
The mess of crows that fills the apple tree,
makes a racket, lifts off.
In between, quiet.
The winter fog is a blank.
I wish I could make sense
of the child’s empty bed,
the bullet hole though my brother’s heart.
The mailman drops a package
on the front stoop and the neighbor’s dog
won’t stop barking. I tread
down the stairs, lightly.
Because we can’t know
what comes next, we say,
The plum tree is blooming early.
There are buck antlers lying in the grass.
A mountain lion left its footprints by the bridge.


- Danusha Lameris

Making Passage

It’s like swimming across a river
with our eyes closed, this passage
through the center of our life.

Sometimes we have to navigate
from the inside out—when the stars
hide their light, when we cannot see the bank

on the other side, when the hounds
of our past bark on the shoreline
braying their mournful song at our leaving.

It is the stillness at the heart of the fire
that guides—the voice of our angel of mercy
that rings out when we look over our shoulder

at the old life with longing. You cannot go back,
she says, that place is gone now. And for a moment,
we freeze in the river sure we will drown,

forgetting which way is up and down,
forward and back, as the roar of the roiling rapids
pours through us, our heart filled

with all the questions that have refused
to leave us alone. And then something
remembers itself, lifts our shoulders above

the swirling cauldron of in-between,
and we simply let go of the fight to stay.
The tangled paradoxes flow on through

the body of the river, and we are carried
by an invisible current that draws us closer
and closer to the edge of a new world.

On our knees, we find root and ground,
give thanks for this fertile soil, seeded
with our dreams, thirsty for our arrival.

- Laura Weaver

Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp


Softly, it always began softly.
Then slowly swelled to a wail.
Men’s voices. Maybe seven of them
up on the hill behind the house.


A breeze through the windows
stirred the curtains like clouds.
I was five, or six. Around midnight
it would start—such a doleful sound.


They were drinking. It was Saturday
and the mines were closed. Their song
would wake me—their longing.
It was a language I knew,


though I couldn’t make out the words.
But the music—that was theirs.
Some ancient secret. A string of notes
piecing together who they once were.


My twin brother slept soundly.
I was alone with this mystery.
It haunts me even now, this lament
to their gods. If flowers were songs—


if the marigold sang, it would mourn
like this. I imagine them still
sitting on a dark hill chanting
their dirge. Some nights I wake—


I hear them. I don’t remember
my dreams, so I dutifully make
my way to the window.
All I see are clouds and mist.


- Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

For a Coming Extinction


Gray Whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing


I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day


The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours


When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices


Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important


- W. S. Merwin

Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem III]


Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.


- Adrienne Rich

The Crisis

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.


- Tom Paine
(December 23, 1776)

The Daily News

reading the obituaries
the world goes on
at a far center
a universe dies
a compression of lifetime
into words
sometimes
a photo
of someone
smiling

- Les Bernstein

Snowflakes

Ecclesiastes says “for everything there is a season.”

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...8_10-20-15.png

You say “It’s tax season;
it’s baseball season; it’s allergy season;
I’ve got to season the steak on the barbie;
besides, I don’t have time to change the world.”

Goethe tells us of the genius, power and magic in boldness.
You say “What can I do, anyway?
The foxes are guarding the henhouse;
the juggernaught is out of control;
we’re all just snowflakes in a windstorm.”

The mountain asks “Which snowflake, falling,
will be the one to send down the avalanche
to change this entire landscape?”

- Larry Robinson

Great job, Larry! Anna and I love you!
Roland

Dream Song #16

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    ...    Yo no sé!
- César Vallejo

They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals
they had programmed and there are blows in life so
powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches
and there was water and it poured in through our mouths

and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the
sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies
and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we
had been and the bodies of the people we had loved

and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we
felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming
through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they
would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course

it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our
mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re
dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths
were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and

it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J
and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J
and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were
hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little

worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving
into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy

- Daniel Borzutzky

In Praise of Earth

We kept on dancing last summer though the dancing had been called subversive.
We weren't alone at the end of this particular world and knew
it wouldn't be the last world, though wars
had broken out on all sides.
We kept on dancing and with us were the insects who had gathered at the grounds
in the grasses and the trees. And with us were the stars and
a few lone planets who had been friends
with the earth for generations.
With us were the spirits who wished to honor this beloved earth in any beautiful
manner. And with us at dawn was the Sun who took the lead
and then we broke for camp, for stickball
and breakfast.
We all needed praise made of the heart's tattoo as it inspired our feet or wings,
someone to admire us despite our tendency to war, to terrible
stumbles. So does the red cliff who is the heart
broken to the sky.
So do the stones who were the first to speak when we arrived. So does the flaming
mountain who harbors the guardian spirits who refuse to abandon
us. And this Earth keeps faithfully to her journey, carrying us
around the Sun,
All of us in our rags and riches, our rages and promises, small talk and suffering.
As we go to the store to buy our food and forget to plant, sing so
that we will be nourished in turn. As we walk out
into the dawn,
With our lists of desires that her gifts will fulfill, as she turns our tears
into rivers of sweet water, we spiral between dusking and
dawn, wake up and sleep in this lush palace of creation,
rooted by blood, dreams, and history.
We are linked by leaf, fin, and root. When we climb through the sky to each
new day our thoughts are clouds shifting weather within us.
When we step out of our minds into ceremonial language we are humbled and amazed,
at the sacrifice. Those who forget become the people of stone who guard
the entrance to remembering. And the Earth keeps up her
dancing and she is neither perfect nor exactly in time.
She is one of us.
And she loves the dance for what it is. So does the Sun who calls the Earth
beloved. And praises her with light.

- Joy Harjo

Eulogy

My mother was a dictionary.
She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.
She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.
When she died, we buried all of those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.
She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.
She knew words that will never be spoken again.
She knew songs that will never be sung again.
She knew stories that will never be told again.

My mother was a dictionary.
My mother was a thesaurus,
My mother was an encyclopedia.

My mother never taught her children the tribal language.
Oh, she taught us how to count to ten.
Oh, she taught us how to say “I love you.”
Oh, she taught us how to say “Listen to me.”
And, of course, she taught us how to curse.

My mother was a dictionary.
She was one of the last four speakers of the tribal language.
In a few years, the last surviving speakers, all elderly, will also be gone.
There are younger Indians who speak a new version of the tribal
language.
But the last old-time speakers will be gone.

My mother was a dictionary.
But she never taught me the tribal language.
And I never demanded to learn.
My mother always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”
She was right, she was right, she was right.

My mother was a dictionary.
When she died, her children mourned her in English.
My mother knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.
Sometimes, late at night, she would sing one of the old songs.
She would lullaby us with ancient songs.
We were lullabied by our ancestors.

My mother was a dictionary.
I own a cassette tape, recorded in 1974.
On that cassette, my mother speaks the tribal language.
She’s speaking the tribal language with her mother, Big Mom.
And then they sing an ancient song.
I haven’t listened to that cassette tape in two decades.
I don’t want to risk snapping the tape in some old cassette player.
And I don’t want to risk letting anybody else transfer that tape to
digital.
My mother and grandmother’s conversation doesn’t belong in the
cloud.
That old song is too sacred for the Internet.
So, as that cassette tape deteriorates, I know that it will soon be dead.
Maybe I will bury it near my mother’s grave.
Maybe I will bury it at the base of the tombstone she shares with my
father.

Of course, I’m lying.
I would never bury it where somebody might find it.
Stay away, archaeologists! Begone, begone!

My mother was a dictionary.
She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.
She knew words that will never be spoken again.
I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.
Maybe this poem is a tombstone.

My mother was a dictionary.
She spoke the old language.
But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.
She always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”
She was right, she was right, she was right.

- Sherman Alexie

What We Need


on earth we need nothing new no gizmo style fads

no media distraction what we need is old

ancient primal primitive pagan we need torah runes testament

vedas dharma chant gregorian taiko drum salutations to the sun

we need what we have been given from the beginning Word

rolling thunder god condensing out of Spirit

the deep the water the firmament the air the fire

the whispering whistling wind of Spirit pulsing in all matter

what we need radiates from the sun the stars from the Bodhi tree

the burning bush speaking to our hearts

with our drums we call back to the cosmos

what we need is what we knew as Bushmen who heard the angels

who saw the light shining from within all things

what we need is to remember who we are what we know

with our bare feet on the earth our round heads below the dome of the sky

make one endless gracious bow to the great being of Love

who gives us life on earth life in the stars

make one endless gracious bow to what we know

the truth of love the love of truth

- Theresa Roach Melia

My Father’s Studio, 2005
As if browsing in a gallery,
I flip through canvases leaning against the wall
behind my father’s studio. A clear October day,

the air breezeless, birdless. Silence
still cloys like oily mud, two months
since the flood. The studio’s siding sags;

the back door won’t close. I look in:
heaps of clothes rotting, shelves of LPs,
their jackets fused, some swollen books,

and, further back in muck and shadow,
forty years of work my father made,
and catalogues, and slides, and reviews.

I step back into the sunlight,
look through the canvases again,
remember my father working on them,

and time unravels and I see myself
doing the things a ghost does,
shuffling inside the narrow frame

of a world of ruined images. Yes,
I remember these paintings.
They were good. And I remind myself:

he’s already repainting them.
They’re still good.
Stop acting like a ghost.



- Brad Richard

For Warmth

I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I’m not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands,
to keep my loneliness warm,
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me in anger.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

- Theodore Roethke

Stories


Let me think of the way that story goes
About the king of time and his long robes.
The world is breathless for good storytelling.
Always words find their way out of us
And our mouths shape them firm and forever.
Sometimes songs come into us flowing from streams
Towards places sounds have never been.
Always other voices are speaking through us.
Stories wander the royal road of dreams
With their silent language. Words arrive
The way the shaman came, the first teller,
Then came the prophets and their retelling.
Many sounds faded, forgotten or ripened to return

Again when synchronicity could acquire its sense of timing.

Words find their warmth in the moist mouth of revelation.
These stories cross the far horizons and in time find each other.
That occurrence is a gift as written records tell the tales
On stone, on leaf, parchment and on the page of living memory.
Stories are our eternal bread. They reveal the divine passwords
At the gates that open to the center of our lives.


- Richard Meyers

The Source

Water is the least environmentally impactful
bev*erage and bottled water is the most environmen*tally
responsible packaged drink choice.
- INTERNATIONAL BOTTLED WATER ASSOCIATION

Far from these woods and this river, far from the Source,
in a made place not easy to comprehend,
harder than woods and river but much less hard,
where sky and grass are priceless or must be shared,
and shade is rectilinear and smooth;
where the scourge teems upward in tall elaborate mounds,
and doom seeps outward, settling a dull gray crust
over what once were woods and river like these;
in the back of a double-locked shelter in a room where salt
and bread are kept safe from the rain, from rats and starlings,
in a humming iron chest that holds inside it
fresh weather like that of a day between fall and winter;
on a crowded shelf of that chest stands a vessel pressed
from molecules of degraded plantlife and creatures;
and there, in that thin vessel—that is where
the creature, exiled forever from the Source,
further and further cut off from woods and river,
keeps for itself eight handfuls of the river.
It opens the door of the chest. It stands and drinks.
The once-living bottle is see-through like the contents,
the label of vegetable fiber the color of envy.

- Joshua Mehigan

Indigo Blue

Must it always be this way?
The heart blood red, always red
hot and thick and steamy?

I know the hearts on fire today
passion, courage, fierce rhythm and heat
but tell me, can’t the heart just once
find another color

Green maybe
as winter moss just after the rain
or the green of chamomile just before it blossoms

The green of jasmine leaves
flowing through the eyes
then through my heart

Or maybe the heart can be butter yellow
the yellow of a whole pound of it
at a Sunday breakfast with friends

And why not a heart sun yellow
as beautiful and full of hope as that
single chrysanthemum corsage
at the homecoming dance so long ago

It’s primary, this thought
a green heart, a yellow heart, and yes
a heart vermillion red

But they won’t do for me today
Today is more complex
I need a blue I cannot name
a blue from another place

No, don’t give me your sky blue of a western afternoon
Full of soft birds and wind
And forget yours flowers of violet and periwinkle

If I can’t do red today
I’m farther still from soft blue petals

My heart today is that other blue
darker than blueberries crushed underfoot
and darker than grapes
abandoned on the vine

This is a blue past midnight
almost past caring
try indigo blue heading to black

Today my heart filled with
sorrow, pain and helplessness
hidden from light and growing dark
is indigo blue heading to black
a blue so dark, even God can’t see it clearly

My country is being torn apart
And I am unable to stop the madness

Yes, my heart is indigo blue
today

- Doug von Koss

Ongoing

Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
Stored generations of filtered quietude.
And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way
the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what.
She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

- Rita Dove

Dust On My Forehead

My outrage is not helping my country
My dismissal of this absurdity
is not strengthening my resolve
My denigration of “those people”
joins me
with them
Go ahead
make your own conclusions
I too want a fair world
I too want to live in a country
where elected officials care
about the poor and the sick
I want our rivers and oceans
and immigrants and children
protected.
Can I see this in a kinder way?
Can I be more Zen and let my kind face beam out to you?
Can I speak more patiently like a Christian?
Can I be more respectful like a Muslim?
Can I be more Jewish
with impassioned arguments?
Can I dance more like a Sufi?
Can I bow down on this earth
and leave the brown dusted
on my forehead
not brushing the precious
soil off the knees of my jeans?
Like Ash Wednesday
or a tattoo or a black
band worn around my arm
you will see my attempts
my way
to make peace
with this troubling world
It involves placing my forehead
on the earth
in my garden
or the patch of weeds
in my driveway or the sand near the creek
- look closely
- into my eyes
- they are brown
The speckles left over from all that kneeling
and bending
and giving thanks.

- Kristy Hellum

Autumn


Hints of autumn

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...1_14-49-59.png

are peeking at me—
a few golden leaves
among the numerous green.
Daylight is diminishing
while darkness grows longer.
Vegetable plants are
at least half spent—

just like me—
in the midst of
life’s autumn,
at least half spent.
This body is stiffening
despite yoga stretches
and nature walks.
Tiredness increases
despite longer nightly sleep
and occasional naps.

The desire to do
is metamorphosing
into the desire
to just be . . .
to rest, to count blessings,
to smile at this rich,
fulfilling life’s
gifts and ironies,
to feel abiding love
for dear ones
abiding on the other side;
to remember abundant good times
and marvel that
many difficult challenges
and tribulations have
actually passed;

to appreciate the opportunity
to slow down, rest, and
contemplate life’s transitions
during the long, dark nights
and short golden days
of autumn.

- Zahira Rabinowitz

Just what I needed today. TY.

When There Were Ghosts

On the Mexico side in the 1950s and 60s,
There were movie houses everywhere

And for the longest time people could smoke
As they pleased in the comfort of the theaters.

The smoke rose and the movie told itself
On the screen and in the air both,

The projection caught a little
In the wavering mist of the cigarettes.

In this way, every story was two stories
And every character lived near its ghost.

Looking up we knew what would happen next
Before it did, as if it the movie were dreaming

Itself, and we were part of it, part of the plot
Itself, and not just the audience.

And in that dream the actors’ faces bent
A little, hard to make out exactly in the smoke,

So that María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz
Looked a little like my aunt and one of my uncles—

And so they were, and so were we all in the movies,
Which is how I remember it: Popcorn in hand,

Smoke in the air, gum on the floor—
Those Saturday nights, we ourselves

Were the story and the stuff and the stars.
We ourselves were alive in the dance of the dream.

- Alberto Ríos

Flammable


Like roadside weeds, dried
leeched of color
bleached pale,


foxtail, wild oat, rattlesnake grass
their thin throated rasp
and rustle lost in the breeze.

Unheard, unseen,
men and women mass
waiting, fuel for the match—

the spark of anger
flicked into the crowd
leaps to life, becomes

a rolling wave of flame
roaring across the shocked land

thick air, clogged with smoke
the vengeful bones of those who burn.

When they are but ashes
smothering the land
winter skies will weep

and in the spring
roadside flowers will blaze
bright with color.

- Lisa Shulman

Autumn Passage

On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

On the dazzling toddler:
“Like eggplant,” he says,
when you say “Vegetable,”

“Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

glory of grown children’s vigil,
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.

- Elizabeth Alexander

Better Than Expected

Things were not as bad as I had thought.
The scrape in the fender of the rented car
could be hidden with a little white paint
before I returned it to the agency.

This CD of new age music, which I just liked it first,
with its that synthetic wind of pulsing jellyfish,
does a remarkable job of slowing down my heart.

Merely to have survived to this point
is already the most unlikely triumph;
to still be breathing and trying to improve.

Things are definitely better than expected.
I'm not on trial for anything.
I have given up on the idea of great success.
The oncologist says the X Ray shows no “abnormalities.”

We are always trying to come to a decision,
always in a place where we are making up our minds
whether this soup is good, the flowers pretty,
whether we are fortunate, or poor.

All my life I have been
loved by women,
held up by water,
ignored by war.
I have outlasted the voluntary numbness
I required to remain alive.

Why shouldn't I be able,
why shouldn't I be able now
to walk down the street,

under the overhanging trees,
and raise my arms and say
that the ring shaking down from the leaves
is not an inconvenience but it's joy?

- Tony Hoagland
(November 19, 1953 - October 23, 2018)

The New Dark Ages

Thunderstorms stir me up—
the stillness right before
the first close tremor,
the pond shivering
at the height of summer,
the field full-blown, going to seed.
But this storm scares me.
A foreign climate occupies the land.
When nature was God, in my childhood,
I wasn't afraid. Snow buried the town,
the river flooded it,
lightning set the woods on fire.
In months the damage bandaged itself
with mosses and ferns.
This storm comes from another
world, here by mistake,
its rain blistering the birch leaves.
Has it been weaponized?
No one knows what to expect
of a storm with human parents.

- Chase Twichell

Sometimes


Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

- David Whyte

Ground of Truth


Does greed win?
Can it outrun justice?
Does it subsume truth?
I think it eats itself like a hungry boar
Gobbling away at itself until
It destroys every vestige, every morsel, every crumb.
Left are the teeth of truth
Telling the stories that lies cannot obliterate.
The tongue may deceive but the eyes cannot
Disguise a malicious intent just as
The rose cannot perfume away the rot of evil.
Ah, but the lilies of the field in all their glory
Stand tall as sentinels of truth and goodness.
Their beauty covers greed’s detritus
As it becomes the scented soil of tomorrow’s dreams
And Truth sprouts anew to show us in rainbow hues
The arc of justice and honesty.


- Pat Morgan

The Diameter Of The Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

- Yehuda Amichai

(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

On a Day Like Today


We are feeling the first
glint of shock that our
ancestors felt the day they
were expelled from Spain.

Now our restive hands
are sensing the first drops
of pelting rain that fell on
loved ones who boarded an
unspeakable train.

We remember those who wore
yellow stars and perhaps those
times are not so far away.

Maybe soon on a day like today
we will see crescent moons on
the sleeves of those who have
no place to pray.

Glance upwards at the angry
sky casting an ominous pall
over the frightened heads of
brown-skinned children who
are pleading: why?

The latest version of “it can’t
happen here” is no longer
news from a distant
shore; it’s here at our door.

My hope is that you and I will
awaken and be vigilant on
behalf of all that we hold to
be dear,

And my prayer is that our tired
eyes can see and our broken
hearts can hear.

- Bruce Silverman

were they singing

were they
singing, praying, daydreaming
was the Rabbi droning on
maybe they were sleeping
I used to fall asleep in church

the embrace of shabes peace
brought them to the shul that day
where unsuspected terror struck

senseless serial assaults
spike my blood pressure
even evoke a momentary outrage
then fade
often before the next news cycle begins

this one
threatens my balance
spinning dizzy falling
on my knees immobile
stuck in centuries old tear soaked mud
not ready to resurrect

what is this sorrow
I am not a Jew
what is this compulsion to
tightly hold this pain
as if letting go would shatter a trust
but with whom

tomorrow
time
the grand arbiter
may work its magic
begin to crowd out
yesterday’s biddings

but today
aware the sound of breaking glass
has never cost me more than
just an inconvenience
today
eighty years since Kristallnacht
today I am a Jew

- JoAnn Smith

At a Country Funeral


Now the old ways that have brought us
farther than we remember sink out of sight
as under the treading of many strangers
ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while
they are cast clear again upon the mind
as at a country funeral where, amid the soft
lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive
solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
persist the usages of old neighborhood.
Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
knowing the extremity they have come to,
one of their own bearing to the earth the last
of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.
They stand and think as they stood and thought
when even the gods were different.
And the organ music, though decorous
as for somebody else’s grief, has its source
in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
and across the sea. How long a time?
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my
self in Thee. They came, once in time,
in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned
to the world. The fields and the work
remained to be returned to. Now the entrance
of one of the old ones into the Rock
too often means a lifework perished from the land
without inheritor, and the field goes wild
and the house sits and stares. Or it passes
at cash value into the hands of strangers.
Now the old dead wait in the open coffin
for the blood kin to gather, come home
for one last time, to hear old men
whose tongues bear an essential topography
speak memories doomed to die.
But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed
is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
to pass on into life the knowledge
of what has died. What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed
of our life in this place. There is not only
no better possibility, there is no
other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible
new start. And so as the old die and the young
depart, where shall a man go who keeps
the memories of the dead, except home
again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, lest the dead die
a second and more final death.

- Wendell Berry

You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught

- Richard Rogers

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught...

---

WONDERFUL choice! :heart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk

Here is the song on YouTube One of the most memorable from childhood! I can tell because of the indelible memory of it, and the tears that well up, still.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one….it's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
Infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated from the German by Robert Bly)

In the Event of Another Morning

In the event of another morning,
I ask all those inclined to a violent act,
of whatever sort, physical, psychological, economic,
to remember your mother’s breast and
the soft sound of her breath in your ear.
If you lost your mother, remember your longing and your pain.
Remember your beating heart and your dying day.

In the event of another morning,
I ask all those inclined to a violent act
to remember the pinprick of recognition
in the perception of their hallowed face.
Remember that time dismisses all beings equally
and honor is the coin of the realm.

In the event of another morning,
consider allowing yourself to be held
by those whom you would harm, feeling
the gentle warmth of their arms, and
the yearning of your heart.

In the event of another morning,
let not the hardship of the sowing
rob you of the richness of the harvest
that will come with your patience.

In the event of another morning,
might we know together the fresco of our passions
and study the patterns of our birthright.

In the event of another morning,
there will be lessons and we would be wise to listen.

In the event of another morning, may the sun rise on your forgiving face.

- Tim Hicks

The Earth Is Dying

The earth is dying.
We sit in hospice, we few
who are willing
to bear witness.
People say –
My life is fine,
difficult at times,
but fine.
The rent gets paid.
There is food in the refrigerator.
The sun rose this morning.

But in my lifetime
half the creatures of the sea
have died.
The plankton is full of plastic.
Turtles eat it and are full
of plastic as well, and sometimes
they are trapped in the plastic islands
filling our heating oceans.
The glaciers are disappearing,
almost before our eyes.

You don’t want to hear this.
I don’t want to hear this.
But how will the children breathe
when the oxygen producers are gone?
How will they live
when there is no clean water to drink?

Oh, I will be gone by then,
dead and beyond caring.
But I have children,
and my children have children,
still wide-eyed and excited
by life and possibility.

We are called
to bear the unbearable.
She is dying, and so
we are dying.
Will you be with Her?
Will you give Her
your tears?

- Maya Spector

This Is How I Voted Today


This is how I voted today.
I went to the woods and dug a hole
under fern in leaf rot and luminous fungi

into which I pressed my mouth and screamed
a long hot uncreated vowel containing
the first and last letters of every alphabet.
I signed my vote with my tears,
it was ratified by planetary silence
groans of Adam's first wife from far below
heaved out of the groundlessness
where she is gowned in seamless glistening mycellia.

Only then did I realize what I'd voted for
the abolition of Republicans and Democrats,
the downfall of spires and hierarchies,
the dissolution of superpacs and
$50,000 a plate dinner parties
in Hollywood and the Hamptons,
the deconstruction of the Constitution into a single
proto-Hebraic rune,
inscribed on a cavern wall somewhere under
the vast and indecipherable border
between Mexico and Arizona.

The overthrow of male and female hegemony,
the annihilation of both capitalism and socialism,
the eradication of black and white by a rainbow of tears,
the renaissance of family farms and local small-business collectives
spawning an exquisite tapestry of bio-regional economies where
no mention is ever made of "government."

Where politics evaporates into folk music story-telling
fermented cabbage useful tools
and the gentle heroics of mere listening.

I voted for the mule that Jesus rode into the city
proclaiming forgiveness of all debts
which is the same mule Laotzu rode out
beyond the wall of China.

Which is also the mule that Rumi sat backwards on
stumbling Westward into exile
gazing Eastward toward eternal loss--
that mule I tell you will be president!

I voted to compost and manure the floor of the Senate
entangling every politician in a web of hemp moss
mushrooms and deer pellets.
I voted to turn the dome of Congress all abuzz
into a giant hummingbird feeder.

I voted for the reclamation of all human skin
with musky forests of golden fur.

My vote was the sound of Yes in every tongue
the co-whispering of all leaves
the council of trees
the un-clink of gold and emeralds returning to
veins in stone the echo of a primal Sigh
that meant to sing the color green
but accidentally created the stars.

- Fred LaMotte

AMEN!
:heart:
And add this one to it, as well!

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...7_08-42-45.png

I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.

I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.

But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.

You can stay that way
And even bloom!

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter.

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days
Like a broken man
Behind a farting camel.

You are with the Friend now.
Learn what actions of yours delight Him,
What actions of yours bring freedom
And Love.

Whenever you say God's name, dear pilgrim,
My ears wish my head was missing
So they could finally kiss each other
And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!

O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter

And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!

~ Hafiz

From:
https://www.thebarefootjourney.com/single-post/2015/12/22/Cast-All-Your-Votes-for-Dancing

The Ancient Ones


From the beginning
We have been with you.
We are the Ancient Ones
And we remember.

We remember the time when there was only love,
The time when all breathing was one. 

We remember the seed of your being 

Planted in the belly of the vast black night. 


We remember the red cave of deep slumber, 

The time of forgetting, 

The sound of your breath, 

The pulse of your heart. 


We remember the force of your longing for life,

The cries of your birth 

Bringing you forth.

We are the Ancient Ones 

And we have waited 
and watched.
You say that you cannot remember that time


That you have no memory of us. 

You say that you cannot hear our voices 

That our touch no longer moves you. 

You say there can be no return 


That something has been lost, 

That there is only 
silence.
We say the time of waiting is over. 

We say the silence has been broken. 


We say there can be no forgetting now. 

We say, 
Listen.
We are the bones of your grandmother's grandmothers. 

We have returned now, 

We say you cannot forget us now, 


We say we are with you
And you are us. 


Remember,
Remember.

- Patricia Reis

Tell that to Trump!

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

- Mark Nepo