Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.

All is well.

- Henry Scott Holland

This is how I feel about your usually daily offerings, Larry. Too often we wait until we have lost a loved one to speak our appreciation for that loved one's beautiful contributions to our lives. Thank you!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

For Natalie Rogers:

On the Death of the Beloved
...

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The Decision

There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of   kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it —
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
it cannot be after turned back from.

- Jane Hirshfield

Then we will go to Europe

Then we will go to Europe, go
to Venice or Berlin, and live like Rilke
in communes of verse and there,
maybe there, we will shake off this disease
which dulls our senses and dulls everything
and spreads like aluminium
and clings like a plastic bag in a high branch,
like crude to a gannet’s feathers. Or
if not in the cities then in the forests
or in red caves in red deserts
or around the craters of gunungs in the archipelago
or among sandstone towers in the valleys of the West.
Oh ’
I don’t know. Just take me
somewhere it has not yet reached, somewhere
lonely and still real and let me
stand there and feel nothing
and lose the fear and, finally,
breathe.

- Paul Kingsnorth

Doubts and a Hesitation
Even your name
I have doubts about
and about the trees
about their branches, if perhaps
they are roots
and we have been living
all these years underground.

Who has dislocated the world?
and why are birds circling in our stomachs?
Why does a pill defer my birth?
For years we’ve been living underground
and perhaps
on a day in my seventies I’ll be born
and feel that death
is a shirt we all come to put on,
whose buttons we can either fasten
or leave undone…
a man may roll up his sleeves
or he might…

I am
a captive man’s conjectures
about the seasons behind the wall.

- Garous Abdolmalekian
(translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey)

To My Brother Miguel In Memoriam

Brother, today I sit on the brick bench of the house,
where you make a bottomless emptiness.
I remember we used to play at this hour, and mama
caressed us: "But, sons..."
Now I go hide
as before, from all evening
lectures, and I trust you not to give me away.
Through the parlor, the vestibule, the corridors.
Later, you hide, and I do not give you away.
I remember we made ourselves cry,
brother, from so much laughing.
Miguel, you went into hiding
one night in August, toward dawn,
but, instead of chuckling, you were sad.
And the twin heart of those dead evenings
grew annoyed at not finding you. And now
a shadow falls on my soul.
Listen, brother, don't be late
coming out. All right? Mama might worry.

- Cesar Vallejo

Air Mail

On a hunt for a mailbox
I carried the letter through town.
In the great forest of stone and concrete
this lost butterfly fluttered.

The stamp’s flying carpet
the address’s reeling letters
plus my sealed-in truth
now winging over the ocean.

The Atlantic’s crawling silver.
The cloudbanks. The fishing boat
like a spat-out olive pit.
And the wakes’ pale scars.

Down here work goes slowly.
I often sneak peeks at the clock.
The tree-shadows are black figures
in the greedy silence.

The truth is there on the ground
but no one dares to take it.
The truth is out on the street.
No one makes it their own.

- Tomas Transtomer
(Translated by Patty Crane from Swedish)

En Route

This poem is for you who gaze up
from the rooftops

hammers resting in hands,
for the souls that don’t count
stars,

whose glowing faces darken
when they walk away from the computer,

for you who look up at the sun and forget
it, too, is here for a brief moment,

it, too, has not arrived to its final destination.

And should the bright memory of some star
burn through the stratosphere

and catch your gaze as it hurls itself towards
some new land or sea,

your presence - as you are right now -
burns with the same force of God.

You who are alive and not yet arrived.

- Kara Stricker

Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner - what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Robert Bly)

More than Once

I have crossed the border by going under the fence,
Crawling through one of its many tears.
This is no news:
People cross this way every day.
For us who lived there it was a game
But for those passing through, it was a life.
Once, I sat on the cement footing,
The fence pulled up enough for me to sit there,
Its wires in my hands, and — in that moment —
I felt the fence as an instrument.
My fingers strummed it, tried to play it
But no music came forth. No song.
The wires were too stiff, with no give.
It would not be a guitar, no mandolin.
It simply made the dull rasp of a fence
Bothered, rough on the fingers,
A little dry,
A little dangerous.

- Alberto Ríos

Mankind’s Colonization Rhyme

Enscripted on the gates of the English colony town of Bandon, Ireland in 1600:

"Entrance to Jew, Turk or Atheist; but Death to Ye Bloody Papists".

At least these English colonists,
Determined Protestants, were rhyming racists.
Now a Papist was a Catholic
And the Irish Catholic were Native Gaelic.
Eire their land was their goddess mother
As it was to their Native American brother.
Both stood in the way of manifest destiny
But their land a jewel in the crown of hegemony,
A jingle in the coffers of the civilized,
Whose greed their deaths contrived.
Who took the land they desired
Because guns made them deserv-ed.
They were the strongest, wisest, fittest;
Morality guides the superior race-ist.
So what better for the vermin,
The uncouth heathens thick with sin,
Than civilization’s icon smack in their eye
To become English or American, better die.

- Brian McSweeney

Ghosts Are Watching Me

These are shell days
Echoes in the ear have names
and what they name is on a list
of things you wanted
What did you want in those
unremarkable days when
what was in your pocket
could buy the world?

Now, every little thing that
was wasted
walks down the street in the
early morning and waits for you
at the bus stop, wanting to
hold your hand
Of course there is weeping
Years later, the letters that
came in the mail
told us this was what
should be expected

And now, in my house,
ghosts are watching me
My plan is to uninvite them
because I am not finished
I never bought anything that
I couldn’t put a spell on
and I still feel dangerous
Sometimes, anyway

So look outside
Night falls and the creepy crawlies
prowl the street, their bodies
made of stars
That’s what I expected
Sometimes, in the company of
such gorgeous maniacs
all I can do is laugh

- Eleanor Lerman

October Corn

The stalks of corn in my vegetable garden a deep green not long ago have given way to a yellowing of old age. Once straight, tall and virile they now bend over like an old man, and my tomato plants are stressed from the cold night air of late October. The green ones will not grow or ripen. It pains me a little seeing the sweetness of summer fade day by day but it’s all a part of the plan you know; the strength of summer giving way to the aching bones of autumn.

In Petaluma parents find themselves meandering through The Corn Maze as their children run through the stalks or climb onto straw bales then choose a pumpkin to take home.

I remember trick or treating one year when my twin, Fernando and I were little boys; Tony, our big brother, dressed us as pirates I got an eye-patch, Fernando a handkerchief tied around his head. Tony made us wooden swords and had me go shirtless into the night. He said that a real pirate would brave the cold and so I refused to shiver and not allow the chill to penetrate beneath my skin. Our older sisters took us house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood in our frenzied drive for as much candy as we could gather; pirates pilfering booty. Only Christmas surpassed Halloween in fun and getting something good for simply being young. So many years later now, I am occupied by the business of grown-ups.

I read in the newspapers that the last of the apples and grapes are being harvested here at home as the wars continue to take their human toll; money squandered that could be used to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and cure the sick. It saddened me to read that Paul Newman had died. They say he was old and sick though I only knew him to be young, handsome and generous. Someone wrote a poem about his life the next day; glad that poets write about things that matter sometimes.

My grandaunt, Tia Sara, who lived in Mexico, died when I was ten. She was very old and very wrinkled. She always wore dark ankle-length dresses and flesh colored stockings that covered what little you could see of her ankles. Her long silver hair was always braided and pinned tightly against her scalp. She went to bed one night never to rise again. Ma’s cousin, my tia Concha washed Sara’s lifeless body, combed and braided her hair, powdered her face, applied rouge, and stuffed wads of newspaper in her mouth to plump up her cheeks, sunken in by death. The family had a traditional “velorio” for Sara. Laid her out in her living room surrounded by candles as everyone knelt and prayed for her soul. My uncles dug her grave and buried her the next day. She received a proper memorial service even if she was a gossip who constantly doled out advice that was not asked for. My ma and pa, tios, tias and some amigos have passed on; irreplaceable losses. Sad that they are not with me at least they visit once in a while in dreams; I take some comfort knowing that one day I will be with them.

And I love the Day of the Dead, a custom rooted in the ancient Mexico. A way to honor those who have passed to the other world; a way to accept and even poke fun at, instead of fearing death. I suppose that by doing this we prepare ourselves for our own inevitable engagement with him.

We can fear or laugh and even accept him, for in the end we have no choice in the matter; it is all a part of the plan; are we not like stalks of corn in a garden? small tender sprouts in spring, strong and sturdy in summer, frail in autumn, dried and lifeless in winter.

Let us be like the sketches of skeletons who play music, dance and sing; hence replacing fear with a fiesta. Let us celebrate then, for today we are on this side of the great divide honoring those who have passed to the other hoping that one day we will be remembered and respected in the same manner even if we are imperfect. Raise your cups of atole of chocolate caliente raise your pan dulce: here’s to life mis hermanos y hermanas, here’s to death.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

All Souls
Cougnac Cave, France


Many corners turned beneath
pencil-thin stalactites, thousands
like upside down candles,
wet flames dripping.
Beyond my mind's
violence, there,
an ibex painted
in stalactite-milk
with wall-ooze for
a shaggy coat. Will it always
be buried? Memory
stumbling into mineral stillness.
crystallized, almost lucid, or carried -
a forgotten animal across
my shoulders, radiant
and awash in lactation, made
with hand, mouth, spit.
Dear friend, I remember
being painted
in coal and blood,
and the long gallery
where all souls parade.


- Ann Marie Macari

Biniam Habte, a 20-year-old Eritrean, who had crossed the Sahara in his quest to reach Europe, told a British newspaper reporter in Calais: “On the journey I have made, you carry your life like an egg in your hand.”

Carry Your Life

What does it mean to carry your life
A thing so fragile, so vital
It might burst from your careful
Ministrations and escape to an
Unseen fate?

Do we know that we
Carry our lives or must
Our existence be threatened
For us to awaken to our
Precious, quixotic nature?

A gift, this animated body
Everyday it does the soul's
Labor, the heart's will,
Stirred by a curious
Mind—active and demanding.

Within the body's kind surrender,
We labor, live our illusions
Ask for more, insist.
Unaware or unwilling, we ignore
The delicate light we carry inside.

And in our ignorance,
A hardening begins—
Against our own vulnerability
The vulnerability of all our
Kind. Together we awaken

See ourselves in others, ask how
Do we carry the defenseless eggs
Of others as they cross
Our lives? How will we allow
Ourselves to be carried?

- Rebecca del Rio

The Poets Hang On

The poets hang on.
It’s hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it’s been tried.
We pass them on the road
standing there with their begging bowls,
an ancient custom.
Nothing in those now
but dried flies and bad pennies.
They stare straight ahead.
Are they dead, or what?
Yet they have the irritating look
of those who know more than we do.

More of what?
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
If you try for a simple answer,
that’s when they pretend to be crazy,
or else drunk, or else poor.
They put those costumes on
some time ago,
those black sweaters, those tatters;
now they can’t get them off.
And they’re having trouble with their teeth.
That’s one of their burdens.
They could use some dental work.

They’re having trouble with their wings, as well.
We’re not getting much from them
in the flight department these days.
No more soaring, no radiance,
no skylarking.
What the hell are they paid for?
(Suppose they are paid.)
They can’t get off the ground,
them and their muddy feathers.
If they fly, it’s downwards,
into the damp grey earth.

Go away, we say -
and take your boring sadness.
You’re not wanted here.
You’ve forgotten how to tell us
how sublime we are.
How love is the answer:
we always liked that one.
You’ve forgotten how to kiss up.
You’re not wise any more.
You’ve lost your splendor.

But the poets hang on.
They’re nothing if not tenacious.
They can’t sing, they can’t fly.
They only hop and croak
and bash themselves against the air
as if in cages,
and tell the odd tired joke.
When asked about it, they say
they speak what they must.
Cripes, they’re pretentious.

They know something, though.
They do know something.
Something they’re whispering,
something we can’t quite hear.
Is it about sex?
Is it about dust?
Is it about love?

- Margaret Atwood

From “Letters to my Probable Selves”

The letter in my unsent email file
Begun a year ago. Before.
Revisited now. After.

Questions we have been asking for fifty years:
What if. When. Who. Which one of us first. How.

So many poems dealing with loss.
With death. The sudden losses.
The long, drawn out ones.
The sense of how fragile our lives are.
“Fragility.” Probably the most important piece in my book,
but balanced by “Clarity.” The two flanks.
Libra, holding her own.

The losses keep adding up. At the heart of it all,
Adrianne. Loss of a poet. Loss of a friend.
My sense of her continued presence is deep.
She understood my love for Madge.
And I understood her passion for poetry.
For William. For Eve. For her dogs.
For her last wolfdog, Lady Macbeth.

You told me you have been sick.
Are you well now? I don't know.
So much I don't know.

What I do know:
Madge thinks only of me now,
Of how I will cope after her death.

”This isn’t the way we planned it, is it?” she said.
“No” I answered.

How does anyone know. The when.
The how.

I have this sense that it is okay to send you
what I am thinking.
Feeling. But is it?
I don’t really know.

- fran claggett

​Ten Questions For The New Age

Why does someone who takes the name Buffalo Vision, for example,
after his weekend ayahuasca workshop

always seem to have an unwarranted confidence
that he is going to end up at the Happy Hunting Ground?

If Eagle Mountain marries Western River Woman - fine.
But why do they have to name their daughter Blueberry, or Lake?

Then they send her to suffer at a Waldorf school
where she majors in birch bark and folk dance

and years later has to hire a life coach to help her fill out college applications,
as she painstakingly writes an autobiographical essay

on the theme of how certain so-called sentient beings
can inflict their embarrassing illusions upon another.

Do you get what I'm talking about?
About the follies of playing at innocence?

Walt Disney made some good movies,
but would you really get ten aphoristic sayings from The Lion King

tattooed on your forearm for practical reference
as you ship out to Iraq?

Which brings me to my actual subject, a man I will call Steve,
whom I met at a rest stop right after his second vision quest;

who wore a feather in his hat, was fifty-five, well-fed,
and lived with his mom in Carson City; who

plays his guitar at open mikes and plans on a serious musical career
as soon as he gets more experience.

Steve, who prefers to be called by his true name, Iron Bear.
Whenever I encounter the New Age still in its original diapers,

I confess that I blush down to my deepest roots,
for I, too, am its scornful, not entirely grown-up child.

When I was twenty, I learned to play "Blowin' in the Wind" on a wooden flute;
I made bracelets out of wire and polished quartz and gave them away.

I had a girlfriend who freely expressed her opinion
that people born in Bangladesh had probably incarnated there

to work out their issues with poverty.

Why does the New Age seem so often like a patient in intensive care,
in a delicate condition, requiring giant infusions of illusion

and charity to stay alive,

while the rest of us keep waiting for the day it might get tough enough
to be successfully transplanted into the real world?

Getting back to Steve, still living with his mom, on an allowance, in Carson City:
Nothing can stop him

from going to the open mike every Thursday night and singing his heart out,
or from signing his letter Blessings, from Iron Bear, Poet and Seer, aka Steve.

Pretend for a moment that you are a philanthropist whom I am
asking for a donation to a charitable program

to rehabilitate wandering middle-aged children like the ones I am describing.
What funds can you offer? What advice would you have for me?

What chance do think there is for Steve to ever grow up,
much less find a happy ending?

On the other hand, isn't it some kind of ultimate foolishness
to scold cheerful people who in their way are the pilgrims of our time

about the folly of their happiness?
What kind of folly is that?


- Tony Hoagland

We Are A River


Our life has not been an ascent

up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.

*

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.

- Lao Tzu
(translation by William Martin)

And their work informs our souls.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Poets Hang On

The poets hang on.
It’s hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it’s been tried.
We pass them on the road
standing there with their begging bowls,
an ancient custom.
Nothing in those now
but dried flies and bad pennies.
They stare straight ahead.
Are they dead, or what?
Yet they have the irritating look
of those who know more than we do.

More of what?
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
If you try for a simple answer,
that’s when they pretend to be crazy,
or else drunk, or else poor.
They put those costumes on
some time ago,
those black sweaters, those tatters;
now they can’t get them off.
And they’re having trouble with their teeth.
That’s one of their burdens.
They could use some dental work.

They’re having trouble with their wings, as well.
We’re not getting much from them
in the flight department these days.
No more soaring, no radiance,
no skylarking.
What the hell are they paid for?
(Suppose they are paid.)
They can’t get off the ground,
them and their muddy feathers.
If they fly, it’s downwards,
into the damp grey earth.

Go away, we say -
and take your boring sadness.
You’re not wanted here.
You’ve forgotten how to tell us
how sublime we are.
How love is the answer:
we always liked that one.
You’ve forgotten how to kiss up.
You’re not wise any more.
You’ve lost your splendor.

But the poets hang on.
They’re nothing if not tenacious.
They can’t sing, they can’t fly.
They only hop and croak
and bash themselves against the air
as if in cages,
and tell the odd tired joke.
When asked about it, they say
they speak what they must.
Cripes, they’re pretentious.

They know something, though.
They do know something.
Something they’re whispering,
something we can’t quite hear.
Is it about sex?
Is it about dust?
Is it about love?

- Margaret Atwood

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You sure do find some insight-ful stuff, Larry. And relating this poem to another discussion on Wacco bb; Do we think Steve should be housed in a tiny house, or a shelter? It brings to mind the dilemma that a family had this week whose son/brother died from exposure/or other, in downtown Santa Rosa having refused their offer to have him come home. These are important discussions which we avoid because of the dilemmas they present and our unwillingness or inability to act.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

​...Getting back to Steve, still living with his mom, on an allowance, in Carson City: Nothing can stop him...

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Describe Your Grief

I am driving a back road
where there are still farms,
fenced cattle, tobacco barns.

I can’t describe my grief,
unless it’s like marching
into a lost war, folding clothes by numbers,
waiting in rank for breakfast
beneath the steamy electric lights
before dawn, crawling in a cave
that hasn’t been mapped.

I round a curve and see two birds
flapping in the road.
One has been hit
by a car, and its mate
flutters just above,
wild to inspire
its fallen partner’s flight.

When Anna was ill,
I would have seen her as the fallen bird,
injured in the road, as I hovered,
watching her struggles,
urging her to fly on broken wings.

But now she is gone,
with our marathon conversations,
her startling questions.

And I don’t know
which of those two birds
I am.

- Tom Hawkins

Tracking at Auschwitz

Went tracking at Auschwitz,
looking for animal signs-
tracks, scat, anything.

There was plenty of human spoor but
the only life I saw
was a raptor
perch hunting
from a
bent steel post
of a once electrified
barbed wire
fence.

- George Gittleman

Tornadoes

Not all tornadoes
rip--ravage wide swaths
across grasslands, the flat prairies
nor deep into the wet pungent air
of old plantation country.
No! No Joplin nor Tuscaloosa, here.
These drop,
bomb-like
from the
turbulent
skies of
my mind,
dip down
randomly
here and
there and
lay waste
to all I
have
made
for my
self
over
the
years—
those sturdy structures, carefully placed,
laboriously raised across the landscape of my soul—
my sanctuaries, my havens—
the places where I go to know
the peace of self acceptance.
Gone, now!

And when those turbulent skies have cleared,
I stand amidst the ruin and the rubble
and I look up and I find distant points of light
that tell me where I am
and I know, then,
I will build again
a place for myself.


- Bill Denham

Falling Horse

Ochre, and the black line
of mane painted soft on the wall, legs
pointing up. Who knows how
to fall without landing, to pass through
each dimension upside down? Forgotten,
the upper world and all that light.

Why do you haunt me?
For a little while I want to be alone
with the animals, with the cold stone
and my lamp. The black mane
caresses the horse's head,
floating between us.

- Ann Marin Macari

Before Dark

They used to mass
in the crowns of oaks
on every street for blocks around
but have gone elsewhere,
the evening no longer
gathered by their feathers
but by the leaves, which blot
whatever light is left to the sky.

Whether we saw the crows
as a barely worth mentioning
image of death for the way
they took over branches
with perfect authority,
whether, where did I hear it, their
numbers were thinned by disease,
nothing avails. They are

missing, the crackle of wings
against the weight of their flight,
beaks that broke open
broadcasting any scrap of news.
Like our children, they carry off
whole years, like the wind-borne thought
of cries never welcome enough
day or night in our ears.

- Jennifer Barber

Felix Crow
Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.

- Kay Ryan

Any News

The black bird on the bent tower

where the windmill used to turn

on that deserted farm in Illinois

is still waiting in the falling rain

for any news, any sign

that tomorrow

might be better.

- Doug von Koss

Fall Song
It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for ‘‘divine’’?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.
- Joy Harjo

Clearing

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing
in the dense forest of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.
- Martha Postlewaite