Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

I Love Your Crazy Bones

Even your odds and ends.
I love your teeth, crazy bones,
Madcap knees and elbows.
Forearm and backhand
Hair makes you animal.
Rare among things.
The small of your back could pool rain
Into water a main might drink. Perfect,
From the whirlpools your fingers print
On everything you touch
To the moons on the nails of all ten toes
Rising and setting inside your shoes
Wherever you go.

- Barton Sutter

For The Courageous

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You
who replants today despite unwelcoming soil
so tomorrow can be worthy of the roots;
Your children will grow up to be oak trees

You
who cracks lies
until the grass finds enough spine
to break concrete and taste rain
for the first time;
Your children will sing unconquered through hurricanes

You
who names the nameless
and speaks of their suffering
so we never forget the familiarity of their essence;
Your children will be unashamed of their reflection

You
who pushes against the jagged perimeters
thrusting your weight until you can mold freedom
regardless of the danger;
Your children will dance bravely through sorrow

You
who goes barefoot and empty handed
despite the heavy boots and gun you’ve been given
leaving destiny untouched;
Your children will be prophets,
have fate pressed against their eyes

You
who has been brave enough to move through the earthquakes of heart-break
and carry love into ancestry with permanence
Your children will forgive the ghosts that have haunted their nights
and open the door for their departure in the morning

- Alixa (of Climbing Poetree)

Group Of Men At A Meeting Table

In Imitation Of Tu Fu (712-770) As Translated By Carolyn Kizer

They shift down in their seats or sit off-center.
One leans forward.
Another bows over to write notes in his journal.
Like a good boy, that one sits, back-up, like a cadet.
I have no idea how I sit.

One speaks, then another.
I consider how independently each of us dresses.
Nothing beautiful. Nothing gaudy.
Even my own red does not stand out.

Outside, the dark is like a pearl.
The parking lot well-lit. We wander to our cars.
Scattering to get home. Discussions to-be-continued.
A perfume fills the air. Some sweet tree in bloom
smells like it has filled an entire world all day.

- Bruce Moody

Kyrie

Around midnight he took the oxycodone and listened to Arvo Pärt’s “I Am the True Vine” over and over, the snow falling harder now. He switched off the light and sat without dread of the coming hours, quietly singing along; he smoked any number of cigarettes without thinking once about the horrifying consequence; he was legibly told what to say and he wrote with mounting excitement and pleasure, and sent friendly e-mails to everyone, Lord I had such a good time and I don't regret anything — What happened to the prayer that goes like that? - Franz Wright

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE DIED


ELEH EZKERAH - These We Remember


Tis a fearful thing

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To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.


For your life has lived in me;
You laugh once lifted me;
Your word was a gift to me.


To remember this brings painful joy.


Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.

- J u d a h H a l e v i
(1 2 t h C e n t u r y )

Atlantic low

never to come by here again. And I do not know
what it is all about and I do not care
what it is all about, only that the sun comes
and touches me sometimes and touches the stone
and reminds me. There are trees
on the southern slope, their needles shift in the cloud, shift
under the mountain. Always there is cloud
on the mountain. I dream of the sun,
the sun which touches me when the river speaks,
sun which soaks the stone white, dissolves
the cloud, dissolves the mountain,
dissolves me in it. To be dissolved.

- Paul Kingnorth

For our joy take from my palms
a bit of sunlight and a bit of honey,
as Persephone's bees would have us do.

You can't unmoor a boat free floating,
nor hear a shadow whispering in its furs,
nor overcome the fear that burrows into life.

All that is left for us is kisses,
the downy ones like little bees
that perish once they've left the hive.

They rustle in the crystal labyrinth of night,
their home it is the dense forest of Taigetos,
their sustenance is cowslip, mint, and thyme.

Accept then my wild gift of joy,
this simple necklace made from withered bees
that died while turning honey into sunlight.

- Osip Mandelstam
(translated by Marina Romani)

below, a brief summary of the short, tragic life of Osip Mandlestram.
"Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osip_Mandelstam


Accept then my wild gift of joy,
this simple necklace made from withered bees
that died while turning honey into sunlight.

- Osip Mandelstam
(translated by Marina Romani)[/QUOTE]

A Single Secret Word


When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer keys to living things,
When people who about singing or kissing
Know deeper truths than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To the unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
and people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.


- Novalis (1800)
(Translated by Robert Bly)

For Adam

Life is a magic trick --
Appearing suddenly
out of a black top hat.

Newborns stare up, wide-eyed,
at the colored patterns on the
magician's tie.

Each life is stretched, slowly, into adulthood,
like knotted scarves pulled out of a pocket
too small to contain them.

Love pours out of an empty jar like water --
it is emptied, then made full, emptied
once again, then overflows.

And POOF! A sudden finale,
as the magician himself disappears
up the shirtsleeve of God.

- Lion Goodman

Breaking Surface

Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.

You are the only explorer.

- Mark Nepo

This guy is really good. Gets the "catalogue" of what not to be dissuaded by just right, imo.
Printing out. Putting on our fridge.
The ultimate compliment!
Thanks, Larry. Thanks Mark.
(Oops! Almost wrote "Thanks, Larry. Thanks, Moe. Thanks, Curly! :wink: )

You are the only explorer.

A two-fold good list:
what not to allow from others, and
what not to do to others.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Breaking Surface

Let no one keep you from your journey,
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Let nothing dissuade you
from seeing what you see
or feeling the winds that make you
want to dance alone
or go where no one
has yet to go.

You are the only explorer.

- Mark Nepo

---

Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong.
You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.
That is where you came from and where you’ll return.
You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love.
Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love.
Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up. Often.
You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And then to rise again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives.
It doesn’t require modifiers
It doesn’t require the condition of perfection.
It only asks that you show up. And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.
It’s enough. It’s plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

Thanks, Larry. I needed this today.

Pretty much every day, but especially this day.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong.
You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.
That is where you came from and where you’ll return.
You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love.
Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love.
Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up. Often.
You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And then to rise again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives.
It doesn’t require modifiers
It doesn’t require the condition of perfection.
It only asks that you show up. And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.
It’s enough. It’s plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

---

What the Dust Doesn’t Know

Even this runt, dust-hugging
cactus with nothing to commend
its spiked flesh has a lover

once a year when
the red tent of a calyx,
bursting from its crown of thorns,

is ravished by a bee-like creature,
which wallows in that bristling
pollen cup, then staggers into air

bearing a scrim of dust,
dusting all its other crimson lovers
on the slope, which swell

with purpled fruit, also thorned--
like Jesus on his tree, waiting
for the two Marys to steal past

the dozing Roman guards at midnight
and pluck the tender fruit of his body
from its bed of nails

and consume it,
then pass
the nearly invisible seeds,

which shall rise again
from their fecal tombs. As Life--
barbed and pug ugly

nailed to its crucifix of matter.
But, don’t forget, the nails
are there to nail down

something precious,
however fleetingly
it flowers, it fruits--

something
the dust does not
know, this is what

the lover knows.

- Richard Schiffman

Earth

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

- Derek Walcott

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)


Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be


For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap


And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Respect Your Elders

When you see me sitting quietly,
Like a sack left on the shelf,
Don’t think I need your chattering.
I’m listening to myself.
Hold! Stop! Don’t pity me! Hold!
Stop your sympathy!
Understanding if you’ve got it,
Otherwise I’ll do without it!
...When you see me walking, stumbling,
Don’t study and get it wrong.
‘Cause tired don’t mean lazy
And every goodbye ain’t gone.
I’m the same person I was back then,
A little less hair, a little less chin,
A lot less lungs, much less wind.
But ain’t I lucky I can still breathe in…

- Maya Angelou

Oh Mockingbird!

now that leaves
have obscured the branches
you, too, are hidden
and I am left with only your voice
your continual presence

- Fran Claggett

The Municipal Gallery Revisited


I
Arround me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,
'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'
Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.

III
Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,
Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV
Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;
A great ebullient portrait certainly;
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility?
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.

V
My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, 'My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI
(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII
And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,
'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

- William Butler Yeats

In the Evening

The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

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the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

- Billy Collins

Song Weaver

for Ronnie Gilbert

"Good night, Irene,"
she sang, "Good night, Irene,
I'll see you in my dreams."
& with her pals
belted out other songs
wishing for a hammer
enough to scare a paranoid
government to black-list them.
Fear was not one of her fears -
her sense of outrage at injustice
was too great - & also was her hope.
When she came on stage
there was no doubt who filled it
& her voice was strong for those
who had none. When she was born,
they say, she was put into a red diaper;
perhaps it was that she turned into a flag
to frighten the bulls that shat
upon the tatters of what
they called "our democracy."
She was not to be taken in
by "Freedom Acts" that tainted
not a bit her unfettered laughter;
she was too big for that as was her heart.

So Long, dear friend, it's been good
to know yuh & I know when you get
to that other place you'll teach the angels
some songs worth their singing.

- Rafael Jesús González

Ah, such a large-hearted--and belted out--way to learn about the death of this great lady. Terrific title. (Not sure she'd have been a believer in angels, though.) Janet

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Song Weaver

for Ronnie Gilbert

"Good night, Irene,"
she sang, "Good night, Irene,
I'll see you in my dreams."
& with her pals...

---

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
The morning air is all awash with angels…
- Richard Wilbur
The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.
I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?
Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because
He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,
I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father
Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—
How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee
This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—
And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs
At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.
- Sherman Alexie

Water Shed


The green expanse of duck weed
Parts and there he sits,
Proud - or so I imagine -
In all his feathered irridescence,
Shedding water with neither thought nor effort.

The late Spring rains
Fall on Sonoma Mountain and English Hill,
Dancing down the Laguna and Atascadero Creek.
So Wintergreen becomes Summergold.

But where are the salmon, the steelhead,
The pronghorn and the grizzly?

There is so much for us to grieve now,
So much lost that we will never see again.
And yet so much still arising
That we have only begun to dream.

Can we shed despair
As we shed our tears
And see with clearer eyes
The shining form just now emerging?

- Larry Robinson

Half-Mexican

Odd to be a half-Mexican, let me put it this way

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I am Mexican + Mexican, then there’s the question of the half
To say Mexican without the half, well it means another thing
One could say only Mexican
Then think of pyramids – obsidian flaw, flame etchings, goddesses with
Flayed visages claw feet & skulls as belts – these are not Mexican
They are existences, that is to say
Slavery, sinew, hearts shredded sacrifices for the continuum
Quarks & galaxies, the cosmic milk that flows into trees
Then darkness
What is the other – yes
It is Mexican too, yet it is formless, it is speckled with particles
European pieces? To say colony or power is incorrect
Better to think of Kant in his tiny room
Shuffling in his black socks seeking out the notion of time
Or Einstein re-working the erroneous equation
Concerning the way light bends – all this has to do with
The half, the half-thing when you are a half-being
Time
Light
How they stalk you & how you beseech them
All this becomes your life-long project, that is
You are Mexican. One half Mexican the other half
Mexican, then the half against itself.

- Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is America's new Poet Laureate

I Want To Write Different Words For You

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I want to write different words for you
To invent a language for you alone
To fit the size of your body
And the size of my love.


I want to travel away from the dictionary
And to leave my lips
I am tired of my mouth
I want a different one
Which can change
Into a cherry tree or a match box,
A mouth from which words can emerge
Like nymphs from the sea,
Like white chicks jumping from the magician’s hat.

- Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998)
(translated by Bassam K. Frangieh
and Clementina R. Brown)

Imaginary Dokusan: Perfume

Crushed lime halves in the sink,

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a wood match's sweet-acrid strike...

I keep looking for things with a beauty
that's not incidental, but have found none.
Because of this, the difference between sensuality

and being fully awake in the moment
is often unclear to me, for example

the sun's smell of ripening
even in things still immature—
which of the two pleasure is that?

- Chase Twichell

A Dialogue Of Self And Soul

My Soul, I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

My Self, The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn

My Soul, Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self, Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul, Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

My Self, A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

- William Butler Yeats