Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Arcadia, Mars

To console myself, I wander
wing to wing in the orangery,
slip between twisted limbs,
olives’ silver and green. The air here
whisks so convincingly, I can’t believe
there’s a rock partition keeping me
safe from the pinked-out sky.
In Gethsemane—that ancient, other world—
they say the Virgin Mary
is buried in a similar grove.
They say any rock is agony. They say her grief
was deeper than those roots
(the oldest known on Earth).
Our own carbon dates us. If I could cut
myself open, you’d see rings
lapping more rings: my mother
crying for her mother in the same
way her mother wept for hers.
You’d see the silvery orbit,
where each life dissolved.
But for now, I remain
human. I am a nesting doll for griefs.
Even in utopia, there is suffering:
one sheep forced to walk
the labyrinth, ensuring the grass
regenerates. And my young daughter,
her legs thin as reeds,
chased and caught and pushed by
the boys again. Her layers stripped away.
Not even the olive he wedged
under her tongue
could hold her, clot those cries—
these shepherds, they think of nothing but
what might wake this weak blue soil.

- Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

N'em

They said to say goodnight
And not goodbye, unplugged
The TV when it rained. They hid
Money in mattresses
So to sleep on decisions.
Some of their children
Were not their children. Some
Of their parents had no birthdates.
They could sweat a cold out
Of you. They'd wake without
An alarm telling them to.
Even the short ones reached
Certain shelves. Even the skinny
Cooked animals too quick
To catch. And I don't care
How ugly one of them arrived,
That one got married
To somebody fine. They fed
Families with change and wiped
Their kitchens clean.
Then another century came.
People like me forgot their names.

- Jericho Brown


(The colloquialism of the title, which means "and them"—as in "Tell your mama and 'em I said hello—encompasses a host of people made familiar by the world of the poem. Most of us have known them: elders and distant ancestors whose way of being was rooted in the wisdom of folk knowledge, a generation now all but gone.)

Compassion

Have compassion for everyone you meet
Even if they don't want it.

What seems conceit, bad manners,
Or cynicism is always a sign
Of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on
Down there where the spirit meets the bone.

- Miller Williams

:heart:

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

...
Down there where the spirit meets the bone.

---

Wah!
powerful poem! thanks!

By the way, Miller Williams was the singer Lucinda Williams/s father.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Compassion
...
- Miller Williams

---

Thanks, Roland. Enriches content and continuity. Jean

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

By the way, Miller Williams was the singer Lucinda Williams/s father.

---

Blue

Dawn. I was just walking back across the tracks toward the loading docks when I saw a kid climb out of a boxcar, his blue jacket trailing like a skirt, and make for the fence. He'd hoisted a wet wooden flat of fresh fish on his right shoulder, and he tottered back and forth like someone with one leg shorter than the other. I took my glasses off and wiped them on the tails of my dirty shirt, and all I could see were the smudges of the men wakening one at a time and reaching for both the sky and the earth. My brother-in-law, Joseph, the railroad cop, who talked all day and all night of beer and pussy, Joseph in his suit shouting out my name, Pheeel! Pheeel! waving a blue bandana and pointing behind me to where the kid cleared the fence and the weak March sun had topped the car barns, to a pale, watery sky, wisps of dirty smoke, and the day.

- Phillip Levine

Saw In Louisiana A Live Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.

- Walt Whitman

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

- Wendell Berry

What a perfect Mother's Day poem! Can't we ask Wendell Berry to help save the heart of the world?

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
...
- Wendell Berry

---

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Roland Jacopetti:

What a perfect Mothers Day poem! Can't we ask Wendell Berry to help save the heart of the world?

---

I think he's on it!

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

- Billy Collins

Billy is definitely one of the best poets laureate we've ever had.

[More about Billy Collins here - Barry]

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Lanyard

...

- Billy Collins

---

We Have A Beautiful Mother


We have a beautiful

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...1_08-32-23.png

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


- Alice Walker

On The Death Of The Beloved

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn
Brightening over our lives
Awakening beneath the dark
A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice
Found for us
A new music
That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze
Quickened in the joy of its being;
You placed smiles like flowers
On the altar of the heart.
Your mind always sparkled
With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,
Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again

- John O’Donohue

Cloud Hidden

This chapter is closed now,
not one word more
until we meet some day
and the voices rising
to the window
take wing and fly.

Open the old casement
to the lands we have forgotten,
look
to the mountains and ridgeways
and the steep valleys,
quilted by green,
here, as the last words fall away,
the great and silent rivers of life
are flowing into the oceans
and on a day like any other
they will carry you again,
abandoned,
on the currents you have fought,
to the place
you did not know
you belonged.

- David Whyte

Just beautiful! Only the naked heart can write like that!

I HAVE to quote the little poem Alan Watts made famous, which my heart soaked up word for word and which I imagine accounts for the title David Whyte used:

"I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, "The Master's gone alone
herb-picking somewhere on the hill,
cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown."

Talking to Grief

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...4_15-57-43.png

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

- Denise Levertov

Ventilation

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...10-26-38-1.png

“Happiness sneaks in through a
door you didn’t know you left open.”
– John Barrymore

Become forgetful -
leave everything open.
On the wall,
there is a window,
in the corner
a small crack.

Doors lock, and
windows seal shut,
so force them -
do whatever you can.
Open them
from the inside out.

Happiness,
like fresh air,
flows through windows
past doors, sneaks
into places you’ve forgotten,
even in your heart.

- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Judean Date Palm

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Larry Robinson

Love This Miraculous World

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

- Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry brings it down to the simplest, understandable and most elegant.
"Reduced to the scale of our competence",
In other words: Think globally, act locally.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Love This Miraculous World
...
- Wendell Berry

---

w/Laguna De Santa Rosa

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Richard Nichols:

Wendell Berry brings it down to the simplest, understandable and most elegant.
"Reduced to the scale of our competence",
In other words: Think globally, act locally.

---

High School Senior For seventeen years, her breath in the house at night, puff, puff, like summer cumulus above her bed, and her scalp smelling of apricots — this being who had formed within me, squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night, like an eohippus she had come out of history slowly, through me, into the daylight, I had the daily sight of her, like food or air she was there, like a mother. I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell the difference between her leaving for college and our parting forever — I try to see this apartment without her, without her pure depth of feeling, without her creek-brown hair, her daedal hands with their tapered fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak's wing, but I can't. Seventeen years ago, in this room, she moved inside me, I looked at the river, I could not imagine my life with her. I gazed across the street, And saw, in the icy winter sun, a column of steam rush up away from the earth. There are creatures whose children float away at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for weeks and never see them again. My daughter is free and she is in me — no, my love of her is in me, moving in my heart, changing chambers, like something poured from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed. - Sharon Olds

Dawn
Dawn in New York has

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...9_08-26-44.png

four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
- Federico García Lorca

Gee, I've seen some lovely dawns in New York!
Still, I know what he's getting at. The poem makes its point well, powerful images.
Just saying, there's another side too... :wink:

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:

Gee, I've seen some lovely dawns in New York!
Still, I know what he's getting at. The poem makes its point well, powerful images.
Just saying, there's another side too... :wink:

---

Hey, everyone! I conducted an interview with Larry for my monthly literary column this past week, "Off the Page," and it's now live online! Check out the link here to learn all about your poem-a-day hero.
https://www.sonomawest.com/discoveri...2381867fc.html
-Michelle

Top image is granddaughter, bottom two are myself circa 1940. Even old excretory gases like myself appreciate poetry.

My Father's Letters

Every day my father writes
His life into being. He plants
Razor wire around the perimeter
Of his mind to keep out
The fog that steals the present,
Mines the paths of his memory.

He composes tiny tasks
To define the boundaries
Of his days and lives
In a country shrunken
By the success of survival.

Routine and ritual hold him
As they always have, as a mother
Holds her child, assures him
Of the moment's permanence,
The presence of only now.

Bound by a body less
And less, he walks
The borders of his dwindling
Spheres and touches the stillness
Of the Unknown to come.

- Rebecca del Rio