Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Myrtle

Wearing her yellow rubber slicker,
Myrtle, our Journal carrier, has come early through rain and darkness
to bring us the news.
A woman of thirty or so, with three small children at home,
she's told me she likes
a long walk by herself in the morning.
And with pride in her work,
she's wrapped the news neatly in plastic -
a bread bag, beaded with rain,
that reads WONDER.
From my doorway I watch her flicker from porch to porch as she goes,
a yellow candle flame
no wind or weather dare extinguish.

- Ted Kooser

How It Happens



The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

I thought you

were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many

are clinging to that

I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said

I am the only chance I have

then the sky did not answer

and here we are

with our names for the days

the vast days that do not listen to us



- W.S. Merwin

Perhaps the World Ends Here


The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

- Joy Harjo

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

- Jane Kenyon

Faint Music


Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days--
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears--
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one--
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence--can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend once told about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word "seafood,"
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said "landfood." He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he'd reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast--and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put "fish" up on their signs,
and when he woke--he'd slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child--the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he'd used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They'd have just finished making love. She'd have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. "God,"
she'd say, "you are so good for me." Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
"You're sad," he'd say. "Yes." "Thinking about Nick?"
"Yes," she'd say and cry. "I tried so hard," sobbing now,
"I really tried so hard." And then he'd hold her for a while--
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall--
and then they'd fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It's not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying "And then I realized--,"
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had this idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps--
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

- Robert Hass

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

- Robert Frost

Stands still:

Stands still:
A bridge between worlds:
Between what is gone
And what lies ahead.

Stands still:
A point to turn upon,
Weaving memory
And destiny.

Stands still:
A pause before waking:
The dream’s imagery
Fleeting, slips away.

Stands still:
A moment, the threshold:
The balance, a pause
at the point
on the bridge
where the Earth
Stands still.

- Morgan Vierhelle

Worms

Aren't you glad at least that the earthworms
Under the grass are ignorant, as they eat the earth,
Of the good they confer on us, that their silence
Isn't a silent reproof for our bad manners,
Our never casting earthward a crumb of thanks
For their keeping the soil from packing so tight
That no root, however determined, could pierce it?

Imagine if they suspected how much we owe them,
How the weight of our debt would crush us
Even if they enjoyed keeping the grass alive,
The garden flowers and vegetables, the clover,
And wanted nothing that we could give them,
Not even the merest nod of acknowledgment.
A debt to angels would be easy in comparison,
Bright, weightless creatures of cloud, who serve
An even brighter and lighter master.

Lucky for us they don't know what they're doing,
These puny anonymous creatures of dark and damp
Who eat simply to live, with no more sense of mission
Than nature feels in providing for our survival.
Better save our gratitude for a friend
Who gives us more than we can give in return
And never hints she's waiting for reciprocity.

"If I had nickel, I'd give it to you,"
The lover says, who, having nothing available
In the solid, indicative world, scrapes up
A coin or two in the world of the subjunctive.
"A nickel with a hole drilled in the top
So you can fasten it to your bracelet, a charm
To protect you against your enemies."

For his sake, she'd wear it, not for her own,
So he might believe she's safe as she saunters
Home across the field at night, the moon above her,
Below her the loam, compressed by the soles of her loafers,
And the tunneling earthworms, tireless, silent,
As they persist, oblivious, in their service.

- Carl Dennis

Love Like Salt


It lies in our hands in crystals

too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.

- Lisel Mueller

Class Picture, 1984
I am the
one in the middle
from the left in the first row

the boy who pushes me around
in the playground
he is the sixth one
in the sixth row

The girl I have been in love with
since the second grade
is the one with the radiant auburn hair,

next to the teacher

And my friend Mark
is first in the second row
with his sweater sticking out

that is not all -
if you look closer you can see
the Sydney Opera House
in the background

Superman in the distance
holding up a green car
his cape hardly moving in the wind


- Ramesh Dohan

The Metaphysicians of South Jersey
Because in large cities the famous truths
already had been plumbed and debated,
the metaphysicians of South Jersey
lowered their gaze, just tried to be themselves.
They'd gather at coffee shops in the Vineland
and deserted shacks deep in the Pine Barrens.
Nothing they came up with mattered
so they were free to be eclectic, and as odd
as getting to the heart of things demanded.
They walked undisguised in the boardwalk.
At the Hamilton Mall they blended
with the bargain-hunters and the feckless.
Almost everything amazed them,
the last hour of a country fair,
blueberry fields covered with mist.
They sought the approximate weight of sadness,
its measure and coloration. But they liked
a good ball game too, well pitched, lots of zeros
on the score board. At night when they lay down,
exhausted and enthralled, their spouses knew
it was too soon to ask any hard questions.
Come breakfast, as always, the metaphysicians
would begin to list the many small things
they'd observed and thought, unable to stop talking
about this place and what a world it was.

- Stephen Dunn

Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics

A lamp so you can read the words on the tablet.
A hand to copy the sentences you find.
A hand for you to rest your head.

Feet to dance the gist of what you find.
A bird to scour your heart.
A bird to help you pronounce the sentences.

Breath to fan the fire's nest.
A kiln to test the choice.
A crown to keep underfoot.

Two eyes to see the one in one.
Three to see the two in one.
Seven to see the all in one.
A hand to cross out your name.

A donkey to carry your shit.
A monkey to filch change and food.
A brother to point the way.
A sister to redeem the refused.
A sister to ransom straw.
A sister to wake you with kisses
when you've fallen asleep at your opus.

- Li-Young Lee

The Green Flash

le rayon vert

And the sea’s skin heaves, saurian,
and the spikes of the agave bristle
like a tusked beast bowing to charge
tonight the full moon will soar floating
without any moral or simile
the wind will bend the longbows of the arching casuarinas
the lizard will still scuttle
and the sun will sink silently with a stake in its eye
bleeding behind the shrouding sail
of a skeletal schooner.
You can feel the earth cooling,
you can feel its myth cooling
and watch your own heart go out like the red throbbing dot
of a hospital machine, with a green flash
next to Pigeon Island.

- Derek Walcott

December Notes

The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks

The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,

Filigree threads of chickadee.
And wing patterns where one flew

Low, then up and away, gone
To the woods but calling out

Clearly its bright epigrams.
More snow promised for tonight.

The postal van is stalled
In the road again, the mail

Will be late and any good news
Will reach us by hand.

- Nancy McCleery

Excerpt from Experiencing Death

I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy

Faraway place
I’ve exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ’s birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I’m still alive
On Central Television News
my name’s changed to “arrested black hand”
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I lift up high up the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I’ve experienced death
so that “black hand” becomes a hero’s medal of honor

Even if I know
death’s a mysterious unknown
being alive, there’s no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I’m still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing


- Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo, a poet and literary critic, is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. China has forbidden him to travel to the award ceremony, which will be held on Friday in Oslo. This poem was translated by Jeffrey Yang from the Chinese.

Before The Flood


Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

- W.S. Merwin

Lucky Life


Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows.
Lucky I don't have to wake up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking
Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking SS. Philip and James
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.


Each year I go down to the island I add
one more year to the darkness;
and though I sit up with my dear friends
trying to separate the one year from the other,
this one from the last, that one from the former,
another from another,
after a while they all get lumped together,
the year we walked to Holgate,
the year our shoes got washed away,
the year it rained,
the year my tooth brought misery to us all.

This year was a crisis. I knew it when we pulled
the car onto the sand and looked for the key.
I knew it when we walked up the outside steps
and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle
with swollen drawers and I knew it when we laid out
the sheets and separated the clothes into piles
and I knew it when we made our first rush onto
the beach and I knew it when we finally sat
on the porch with coffee cups shaking in our hands.


My dream is I'm walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
and I'm lost on South Main Street. I am trying to tell,
by memory, which statue of Christopher Columbus
I have to look for, the one with him slumped over
and lost in weariness or the one with him
vaguely guiding the way with a cross and globe in
one hand and a compass in the other.
My dream is I'm in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street
sitting at the oak bar, listening to two
obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942,
and reading the funny signs over the bottles.
My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust
and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone culvert
with a whole new set of friends, mostly old and humorless.


Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
- Gerald Stern

Winter: Tonight: Sunset

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky

- David Budbill
(from While We've Still Got Feet. © Copper Canyon Press)

Salutation

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they are happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

- Ezra Pound

Going Wrong

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. "What can you know of my machinery!"
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: "You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go live
with rock and silence." The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. "You have lived all year without women."
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
"No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn." The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

- Jack Gilbert

Stitching

at the Solstice


In and out
the bright needle goes --
into the fabric
through
and to the other side --
moving invisibly
on the far side,
hidden
like the vanished sun
in its occult passage
across another world
a world dark to us
because unseen.
Yet we now are the ones in the dark;
can we imagine others, those on the dark side,
emerging into light?

The Egyptians thought of the Sun
as descending
into the world of death
where Osiris lay,
and animating the dead world with its rays,
stitching the dismembered god
with lines of light.

As we stitch our lives,
the visible and the invisible
are linked together.
The moving needle threads our actions
into a familiar tapestry.
On the other side, unseen --
like the shaft of sunlight that pierces
the depths of the pyramid --
the threads
weave a pattern of their own,
unknowable
till time unfolds
and the fabric turns.

- Nina Mermey Klipp

Winter Solstice


Perhaps
for a
moment
the typewriters will
stop clicking,
the wheels stop
rolling
the computers desist
from computing,
and a hush will fall
over the city.

For an instant, in
the stillness,
the chiming of the
celestial spheres will be heard
as earth hangs
poised
in the crystalline
darkness, and then
gracefully
tilts.

Let there be a
season
when holiness is
heard, and
the splendor of
living is revealed.

Stunned to stillness
by beauty
we remember who we
are and why we are here.

There are
inexplicable mysteries.

We are not
alone.

In the universe there
moves a Wild One
whose gestures alter
earth's axis
toward
love.

In the immense
darkness
everything spins with
joy.

The cosmos enfolds
us.

We are caught in a
web of stars,
cradled in a swaying
embrace,
rocked by the holy
night,
babes of the
universe.

Let this be the
time
we wake to
life,
like spring wakes, in
the moment
of winter
solstice


- Rebecca Parker

Annunciation to the Shepherds


It's hard not to laugh.
What a picture it makes—
the dumbfounded shepherds
and the stricken sheep,
the cacophony of bleating
and the barking of sheepdogs
dashing and nipping
in a vain attempt at order,
and over it all the angels
trying to make their
shimmery voices heard.
“A who? Wrapped in what?”
the shepherds holler back.
“Where are we supposed to go?”
Poor guys. They wanted directions,
a purpose, some sense of how
the story might end.
And all they got,
all any of us ever get,
was the sound of angels,
somewhere beyond the din,
singing “Glory, Hosanna”
across the improbable night.

- Lynn Ungar

Toward the Winter Solstice


Although the roof is just a story high,

It dizzies me a little to look down.


I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights


And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;


A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook


Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine


The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs


Will accent the tree’s elegant design.




Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause


And call up commendations or critiques.


I make adjustments. Though a potpourri


Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,


We all are conscious of the time of year;


We all enjoy its colorful displays


And keep some festival that mitigates


The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.




Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,


But UPS vans now like magi make


Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves


Are gaily resurrected in their wake;


The desert lifts a full moon from the east


And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,


And valets at chic restaurants will soon


Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.




And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk


The fan palms scattered all across town stand


More calmly prominent, and this place seems


A vast oasis in the Holy Land.


This house might be a caravansary,


The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead


Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces


And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.




Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem


Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;


It’s comforting to look up from this roof


And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,


To recollect that in antiquity


The winter solstice fell in Capricorn


And that, in the Orion Nebula,


From swirling gas, new stars are being born.



- Timothy Steele

Eclipse

I knew what the solstice lunar eclipse
would look like.
No need to wake me up.

I had had a long day,
with another ahead
and from the newspaper article, I
could picture it perfectly:
a poets’s paradise,
namely, as they said, all the
sunrises and sunsets
of the world combined,
nothing less.

So.
I needed my sleep.
But my wife would
have none of it.
A good hour or two into the
sweetest of sleeps
she opened our bedroom door,
a quiet sound, yet sure to awaken.

"You must come see.
It is really something."
And she closed the door
to my arguments.

I dressed, said nothing,
sat as invited, on the porch chair she’d offered,
in the freezing December night,
and waited for the clouds to part
and show me what I expected:
a pale moon, fringed in pinkish orange,
in fact, rose petals of sunrises and sets.

It was just the opposite:
pale edges with a heart of rose-mango.
Unforgettable. For the next 84 years.
She returned to bed; I sat transfixed:

Life constantly disappoints.

- Scott O'Brien

Winter Scene

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:

except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,

in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch

quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.

- A.R. Ammons

Voyage

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage—

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it—

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

- Tony Hoagland

The Unseen Lover

Somehow I guessed that this was going
to happen.
Something told me
this was a special night,
stars, angels, shepherds,
a time to be bookmarked
in history.

Perhaps I knew because
it had happened so often
before,
this pairing of the realms.
Zeus coming down on Leda,
the swan feathers presaging
the angels’ wings,
the heavenly choir surely
there somewhere in
the background.

And of course
there was Dionysus,
born when the Immortal One
ignited Semele to flame,
coming again with
each season’s turn,
bringing wine and poetry
to free us
from ourselves.

And Persephone, the maiden,
raped and carried away
to spend the dark months
with the nether King,
returned to her mother
in annual efflorescence,
yearly greening
of branch and bud,
field and farm.

Today they speak of aliens,
arriving in strange guises
to claim their earthly brides,
offspring compounded of dual
realms, strange amalgam
of disparate spheres.

What if we too
opened our bodies fully
to the formless Other,
made of our wombs
receptacles for light,
for promise,
for overwhelming love?
What if we allowed
the mysterium to enter
and possess?
Who might we then
become?
What worlds might
we beget?

- Dorothy Walters
December 21, 2010

Mountain Lion

Why should we be surprised to find
a mountain lion on a mountain?
That's where they live.
That’s why the name.
"Mountain" Lion.

Cites have their slickers.
The country has its bumpkins.
And as villages have their idiots,
mountains have their lions.

They are called mountain lions,
not valley lions or prairie lions.
Mountain Lions!

So in lion country on your mountain bike
you'd better be a mountain man
or a mountain woman
or a Mountain Lion is going to
eat your candy ass for lunch!


- Doug von Koss
San Francisco 2003

(Response to surprised off road
bicycle enthusiasts)

A New Year’s Blessing

Unhurried mornings, greeted with gratitude;
good work for the hand, the heart and the mind;
the smile of a friend, the laughter of children;
kind words from a neighbor, a home dry and warm.

Food on the table, with a place for the stranger;
a glimpse of the mystery behind every breath;
some time of ease in the arms of your lover;
then sleep with a prayer of thanks on your lips;

May all this and more be yours this year
and every year after to the end of your days.

-*Larry Robinson

Burning the Old Year


Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.


So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.


Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.


Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.



- Naomi Shihab Nye

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...Poster2011.jpg

Rumi's Caravan is returning to Sebastopol for its twelfth season on Saturday, February 5, 2011.

You are invited to join us for a magical evening of poetry in the ecstatic tradition, featuring the works of Rumi, Hafiz, Khabir, Mirabai, Rilke and many others.

Presenters include Gwynn O'Gara, Doug von Koss, Kim Rosen, Bill Denham, Kay Crista, Barry Spector, Maya Spector, Shepherd Bliss, Carol Fitzgerald and Larry Robinson

Kim Atkinson, Cindy Albers and Chris Caswell will provide musical accompaniment.

Saturday, February 5th, 2011
Sebastopol Masonic Center
373 Main Street
7pm (doors open 6:30)

Tickets are $20 and include a delightful tasting of authentic Persian delicacies.


This event has sold out the past four years so you are encouraged to buy tickets in advance by calling or visiting

Many Rivers Books and Tea, 130 South Main St., Sebastopol - (707) 829-8871 or
The Rugs of Persia, 101 Montgomery Drive, Santa Rosa - (707) 576-9000

All proceeds go to benefit the Ceres Project and the Climate Protection Campaign

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you've broken your vow
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.

- Jelalludin Rumi

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles



It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.


Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe if is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.


“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Bun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”


And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Hear the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying
My Woman is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”


There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with the headings like ‘Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusing inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.


Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.


And “The Days of Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends


How easy he had made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
my legs like his, and listen.


- Billy Collins

Names Of The Ancestors

We are moving backward in the granary of our ancestors' names.
When we speak them, wheat fields harvested three thousand years ago
sway again in winds gone on to other galaxies.
Somewhere on that track are all the hands that met mine in the night
and the spoken love word hovering like a hummingbird at the lip of the abundant flower.
The wisdom of sleepers forms a tradition along the arc of generations,
anointing the slippery head of the newborn rising from the sea
and the yellow skull of the corpse set out to dry in the desert.
Now we are touching his twenty layers of embroidered robes.

- Thomas R. Smith

Statues
1989

In Prague, or perhaps Budapest,
the heroes have fallen off their horses.
Here lies a general's profile
and here a helmet, there
a ferrous glove still holding the reins.
The horses, so long inert
under the heavy bodies,
are not used to wind and sun,
nor to the tenderness of their flanks
now that the boots are gone,
and their eyes, so long overcast
by bronze or stone, are slow
to take in the gray city,
the heavyset houses. Gradually
they start to move, surprised
by their new lightness. There's a scent
of rain in the air, and something clicks
inside their heads; it has to do
with green, with pasture. They step down
from their pedestals, unsteady as foals
beginning to walk. No one pays attention
to riderless horses walking
through city streets; these are
supernatural times. Near the edge of town,
where the sky expands, they trust themselves
to break into a run
and then drop out of sight
behind a bank of willows
whose streamers promise water

- Lisel Mueller

After reading "Statues" by Lisel Mueller


You asked what moves in me that yearns to break free.
I cannot name it, but it feels like . . .

A flame in two cupped hands, my body draped long in traveling clothes - setting out on a dark night.

A velvety curtain behind which the secrets of the universe are concealed.

My belly a great bowl scooped full of stars

And beauty, that beloved muse, sets every cell on fire and each hair a strand of golden light.

The secret garden filled with music and jewels from the Tales of the Arabian Nights my father gave me

Inanna in descent to her dark sister and Carol my beloved Ninshubur

A simple and ardent love of silence

The feeling that something completely remarkable is about to be revealed

Awareness of the miraculous in the mundane
loving ordinary moments, washing dishes, kindling a fire
tears of gratitude streaming

There are no ordinary moments
only I too tired or distracted to witness the miracle
my eyes frozen like a statue.

- Kay Crista

Statues in the Park

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—
it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theater across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone bed,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
and murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.

Statues in the Park

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—
it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theater across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone bed,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
and murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.

- Billy Collins

New Decade’s Eve

The First Nation Miwok people called this sacred land Eetawyomi—the hot place. They honored with dances and rituals the curative mineral water that springs from deep in the earth. For millennia, Harbin Hot Springs, as it is now known, was revered as a place of meditation and communication with the spirit realm. Today, Harbin thrives as a retreat for the urban-weary. The property offers miles of hiking trails and an eclectic program of workshops, healing arts, and three yoga classes each day.

child’s pose

the old man rests his forehead

on mother earth

On the last night of the first decade of the second millennium, I sat in Harbin’s library. Almost midnight, I wanted to stay awake. From the temple came the driving pulse of technotrancedance. I headed instead for the springs. It was literally cheek to jowl with 75–100 people in the warm pool. Single folks along the pool’s edge looked longingly toward the center where bathers enwrapped in group hugs gazed into each others’ eyes. Just before midnight, someone started counting “ten, nine, eight …”

new year’s eve

even strangers

kiss

A man who looked like Noah began chanting “Om” and soon everyone was Om-ing. As some finished, others started, the Om rising and relaxing seamlessly in waves that rode the steam into the frosty night air. The ceremonial Om lasted 20 minutes until everyone was enveloped in a cocoon of vibration. Satiated, I started walking back to my camper when I sensed what felt like the gentlest of rain. I couldn’t see much until a motion detector at the Dragon Gate entrance switched on a floodlight. I looked up:

January first

falling more softly than rain

snow





- andrew zarrillo

Recipe for Happiness in Khabarovsk or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand café in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Second Voyage

Odysseus rested on his oar and saw
The ruffled foreheads of the waves
Crocodiling and mincing past: he rammed
The oar between their jaws and looked down
In the simmering sea where scribbles of weed defined
Uncertain depth, and the slim fishes progressed
In fatal formation, and thought
If there was a single
Streak of decency in these waves now, they'd be ridged
Pocked and dented with the battering they've had,
And we could name them as Adam named the beasts,
Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one
With admiration; they'd notice us passing
And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these
Have less character than sheep and need more patience. I know what I'll do he said;
I'll park my ship in the crook of a long pier
(And I'll take you with me he said to the oar)
I'll face the rising ground and walk away
From tidal waters, up riverbeds
Where herons parcel out the miles of stream,
Over gaps in the hills, through warm
Silent valleys, and when I meet a farmer
Bold enough to look me in the eye
With 'where are you off to with that long
Winnowing fan over your shoulder?'
There I will stand still
And I'll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post
And leave you as a tidemark. I can go back
And organise my house then.
But the profound
Unfenced valleys of the ocean still held him;
He had only the oar to make them keep their distance;
The sea was still frying under the ship's side. He considered the water-lilies, and thought about fountains
Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares,
The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,
The flat lakes bisecting the rushes. He remembered spiders and frogs
Housekeeping at the roadside in brown trickles floored with mud,
Horsetroughs, the black canal, pale swans at dark:
His face grew damp with tears that tasted
Like his own sweat or the insults of the sea.

- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

A Dream Of Burning



To lift this wanting up out of dead wood.

Something, someone reaches up to stop this rising

as though the movement up is treasonous.



This wanting has been frozen, caught in the grain

of the fallen log for ten thousand years: Memories

of ice ages and mastodons.



But in the wood is the dream of burning--of flames,

heat and tongues of orange/red/leaping up into

the night, warming those who come close by.



This wanting breaks open the wood. The sow bugs,

spiders, beetles and the invisible captains of decay

are relieved of duty.



This wood is for fire and it is time to burn.



- Francis Weller

Sniper

the photograph of the slayer
reveals a pair of shoulders
informed with a furious patriotism
but no face
he killed five and then himself
smoking the insane cigarette of chance
I love my mother it says
right where he aimed the first shot
I love her more than ever it says
in the puzzled heart of the second victim
sky is an illusion
bolstered by clouds of alcohol
and behind sniper's little house
is lit up with roses and perfection
the third victim wears a shoe of blood
and his mouth repeats novenas
to the mohammedan virgin
this doesn't happen every day
festival of blood and determinism
the fourth victim remembers
the illogical shape of the rain
and the fifth victim
a hundred miles from home
is transported to the diamond heaven
where each minute is a monument of love
angry with the seven virtues of maternity
sniper eats the high price of war
and today as on no other day
he talks to the enormous angels whose
munitions whiten the sea's troubled jungle

- Ivan Arguelles

People Like Us Are Dangerous

In Brooklyn days, I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz, lightweight champion
of the world from Ponce, Puerto Rico. I gazed at the radiance
of the black and white television till it spoke to me in tongues,
a boy spellbound by the grainy spirits who stalked each other in the ring.

I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz when twenty thousand people
at Shea Stadium chanted his name. For fifteen rounds the jazz
percussion of his punches beat the sweat from Ismael Laguna,
El Tigre de Santa Isabel, who lurched off the ropes,
backpedaled and swallowed blood till the last bell.

I wanted to crouch and dip into the arc of my uppercut
like Carlos Ortiz on the cover of The Ring magazine,
where they called him a pugilist with clever hands.
I wanted to be a pugilist with clever hands. My father
bought me boxing gloves and I reddened my brother’s face.
I shadowboxed all the way down the hall.

I wanted something from the clever hand of Carlos Ortiz.
My mother and my father’s sister, dressed for the dance floor
at the Club Tropicoro, tracked the champ to the men’s room
and offered him a cocktail napkin to sign for me.
He grinned like the general of a people’s army
greeting the crowd from a balcony at the presidential palace.

I told everyone in the streets of Brooklyn I wanted to be
a Puerto Rican fighter like Carlos Ortiz. Every day I sparred
in the schoolyard until a boy I did not know waved his hands
in a circle, mesmerizing as a hypnotist, then kicked me
with his hard-soled shoe in a place I could not bring myself to name.
The blood crusted between my legs. I threw away my underwear.

Years later, I met Carlos Ortiz stirring milk into his coffee
at a McDonald’s off the New York Thruway.
The black curls on his forehead had disappeared, along
with the Club Tropicoro and the eighty thousand dollars
he counted out in cash to build his palace of trumpets in the Bronx.

Year by year, the whiskey and the beer wore away the levees
of his brain till he walked like a man underwater. One night
at Madison Square Garden, unable to move his arms or legs,
he stared at the canvas and quit on his stool. Carlos Ortiz drove
a cab on graveyard shift to keep away from all the bars on the avenue,
far from the backslappers who wanted to buy the champ a drink.

Carlos Ortiz is sober now. He thinks of Ismael Laguna, who cannot
pry open his hands, selling souvenir newspapers with headlines about
El Tigre de Santa Isabel. Carlos Ortiz says: People like us are dangerous.

- Martín Espada

Penelope’s Song

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
Do now as I bid you, climb
The shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
Wait at the top, attentive, like
A sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
It behooves you to be
Generous. You have not been completely
Perfect either; with your troublesome body
You have done things you shouldn't
Discuss in poems. Therefore
Call out to him over the open water, over the bright
Water
With your dark song, with your grasping,
Unnatural song--passionate,
Like Maria Callas. Who
Wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite
Could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
He will return from wherever he goes in the
Meantime,
Suntanned from his time away, wanting
His grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
You must shake the boughs of the tree
To get his attention,
But carefully, carefully, lest
His beautiful face be marred
By too many falling needles.

– Louise Gluck

The Curator

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come,
were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,
the youngest assistant curator in the country.
I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes
precisely built to every size of canvas.
We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in,
we got each painting put in the proper box
and out of Leningrad in less than a week.
They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes
waiting in the basement, which was fine,
a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—
but what we did was leave the frames hanging,
so after the war it would be a simple thing
to put the paintings back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again
compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble
after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—
You know it lasted nine hundred days.
Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie
sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,
but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.
They told us this: in three homes far from here
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.
Now they had been sent to defend the city,
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger
than all of us being here in the first place,
inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms,
what they could take the time for, wall by wall.
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.
I told them how those colors would come together,
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout
and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waited for us,
then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes.
Each of us took a group in a different direction:
Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse,
Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,
Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper.
We pointed to more details about the paintings,
I venture to say, than if we had had them there,
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces
the same way we’d done it every morning
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to forget the war
a little while. Maybe more than that.
Whatever it was, the people continued to come.
It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.

Slowly, blind people began to come.
A few at first then more of them every morning,
some led and some alone, some swaying a little.
They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces,
they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,
to see better what was being said.
And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left
and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places,
the blind never came again. Not like before.
This seems strange, but what I think it was,
they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.
They could still have listened, but the lectures became
a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?
Confluences come when they will and they go away.

- Miller Williams

The Sycamore

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

- Harry Caudill

The Time We Have

I have seen
some of the best minds
of my generation
seduced by power
or easy comfort
or second-hand certainty.

And I have seen
others - those of the Great Heart -
who plant sequoias
or ideas
and sow seeds
of joy and justice.

I don't know
if the world will end
in fire or ice,
soon or late.

I do know
that I am glad to be here
and in whose company
I would spend my time.

- Larry Robinson

Crows Calling

One-by-one
each crow calls out to the next
and so it continues
to otherwise be known as
caw forwarding.

- Bill Krumbein

Crow’s Gift

I stretch and yawn.
The early summer sun
strikes my face
I squirm, wriggle and twist
placing one foot on the floor.
Why am I drawn to the front door?
My dog barking?
Or searching for a deep breath
of cool air?
Unbolting the door
I open it wide.
Looking down I see
one clean, fresh, black crow’s feather
neatly placed across the top step.
Like a gift it says,
"I am Crow Medicine.
Keeper of the Sacred Laws.
I can shape shift physical laws
To aid in creating peace!
You can know the unknowable.
Look to the mysteries of life."

The Great Spirit harkens.
Pay Attention!
Know your life’s mission.
Speak your truth.


- Natalie Rogers

White Crow


This little crow wears a coat of snow.

Shaking like a pup, his up

feels the weight of light.



His wings, his feathered chest, are blank

as morning stars erased. His eyes

shards of night through the low fog flow.



Mottled bud of shroud and cloud,

he flashes onyx —

is gone



- Katherine Hastings

Persephone Again

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth--nine months
of fertility and sun,
three of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

- Dorothy Walters

Persephone Speaks

You know very well that death comes,
Yet you live as though it won’t touch you.
You exile any thought tinged with darkness.

In a world of your design there would be:
Flowers without soil;
Sleep without nightmares;
Bodies without pain;
People without flaws.

This world does not meet your expectations.

Open your mind to the fullness of life!
Yes, to wars, child prostitutes, mudslides, tsunamis.

Yes, to cancer, wildfires, car accidents, homicides.

Yes, to abuse, greed, environmental degradation, Republicans.


Until you welcome all the contradictions into your tender heart
You are only half alive.
You feel reality pressing down on you -
A burden growing heavier each day.

Time is the great illusion.
Let this be your resolve –
To live with grateful eyes
And a vast mind.

- Maya Spector

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

Matt’s Guitar

Sometimes when I hear
The sad single strings of a Spanish guitar
Played by a man alone
In an old rhythm that wandered from Madrid
My heart fills to bursting
With a sweet pain
A glorious sadness
A grief so immense
I could not eat it all
If I had a thousand
lonely Sunday mornings.

- Doug von Koss

Descended from Dreamers

And what did I learn, a child, on the Sabbath?
A father is bound to kill his favorite son,
and to his father's cherishing
the beloved answers Yes.

The rest of the week, I hid from my father,
grateful I was not prized. But how deserted
he looked, with no son who pleased him.

And what else did I learn?
That light is born of dark to usurp its ancient rank.
And when a pharaoh dreams of ears of wheat
or grazing cows, it means
he's seen the shapes of the oncoming years.

The rest of my life I wondered: Are there dreams
that help us to understand the past? Or

is any looking back a waste of time,
the whole of it a too finely woven
net of innumerable conditions,
causes, effects, countereffects, impossible
to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

Where's Joseph when you need him?
Did Jacob, his father, understand
the dream of the ladder? Or did his enduring
its mystery make him richer?

**

Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in a which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged.

- Li-Young Lee

Affirmation

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

- Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

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

- Robert Burns

*

This is not a courtroom anymore!

The time of judging who's drunk or sober, who's right or wrong, who's closer to God or farther away, all that's over.

This caravan is led instead by a great Delight, the simple joy that sits with us now, that is the grace.

Hafiz, it may be that you've just poured a toast that will wash love clean of all it's pictures.

- Hafiz

Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

- Wendell Berry

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you've broken your vow
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.

- Jelalludin Rumi
(Coleman Barks translation)

A King Dressed As a Servant

A sweet voice calls out,
"The caravan from Egypt is here!"
A hundred camels with what amazing treasure!

Midnight, a candle and someone quietly
waking me, "Your friend has come."

I spring out of my body, put a ladder
to the roof, and climb up to see if
it's true.

Suddenly, there is a world within this world!
An ocean inside the water jar!
A king sitting with me wearing
the uniform of a servant!
A garden in the chest of the gardener!

I see how love has "thoughts,"
and that these thoughts are circulating
in conversation with majesty.
Let me keep opening this moment
like a dead body reviving.

Shamsi Tabriz saw the placeless one
and from That, made a place.

- Jelelludin Rumi
Ghazal 2730
(Version by Coleman Barks)

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- Jelalludin Rumi
(Coleman Barks translation)

The Poetry Reading

I answered a call
for a poetry gathering
hosted at the home (as I’d misread)
of a woman who bore the name
of the street on which she lived.
Expecting perhaps a home
gracious and well settled,
a hostess adorned with baubles,
poets reading from their work,
and ... how would it be?
I arrived late
at a simple home,
Buddhist prayer flags,
heads silhouetted inside
a picture window at dusk.
I paused outside,
was beckoned silently
through the screen door
into the living room,
stood, listening as a voice
seeming to read, instead reciting
with feeling and at length a work
not by him. Ah.
I was offered
the sole remaining chair
in a circle surrounding
a hospital bed
on which lay the thin form
of a member of the group,
her eye patched,
her left arm wrapped completely
in bandages, overhead a steel triangle.
Voices arose, each in random turn, and
offered from beyond the walls
words from the deepest waters
of human experience. We grew dark, disembodied.
The bed glowed in the center.
Her voice, at last, spoke her own poem. Fluttered, whispered.
We grew quiet.
Our breath held her spirit
poised between this world and beyond.

- Scott O’Brien

Losing Our Minds


Watching you
I notice
the way a life
narrows down
to such a few
simple things

Sunlight streaming in your window
to wrap you in a veil of warmth
a view of our pond
and the distant wooded hills
once apples, now grapes
your fingers roaming the pages
of fading photographs
the comfort of familiar food
and a newspaper from your hometown

This morning
I found your purse
hidden at the bottom of your laundry basket
and felt
your fear of things
slipping away

Sometimes, you tell me
you don't mind
that you're losing your mind
"I'm not in any pain" you say
and all the while
I, in another room,
sit in silence, every morning
hoping to lose my mind

In the way Guatama Buddha
lost his

- Kay Crista

Hymn to the Sacred Body of the Universe



Let's meet

at the confluence

where you flow into me

and one breath

swirls between our lungs



Let's meet

at the confluence

where you flow into me

and one breath

swirls between our lungs



for one instant

to dwell in the presence of the galaxies

for one instant to live in the truth of the heart

the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is

"the secret One slowly growing a body"



two eagles are mating--

clasping each other's claws

and turning cartwheels in the sky

grasses are blooming

grandfathers dying

consciousness blinking on and off

all of this is happening at once

all of this, vibrating into existence

out of nothingness



every particle

foaming into existence

transcribing the ineffable



arising and passing away

arising and passing away

23 trillion times per second--

when Buddha saw that

he smiled



16 millions tons of rain are falling every second

on the planet

an ocean

perpetually falling

and every drop

is your body

every motion, every feather, every thought

is your body

time

is your body,

and the infinite

curled inside like

invisible rainbows folded into light



every word

of every tongue

is love

telling a story to her own ears



let our lives be incense

burning

like a

hymn to the sacred body of the universe



my religion is rain

my religion is stone

my religion reveals itself to me in sweaty epiphanies



every leaf, every river, every animal,

your body

every creature

trapped in the gears of corporate nightmares,

every species made extinct

was once your body



ten million people are dreaming that they're flying

junipers and violets are blossoming

stars exploding and being born

god is having deja vu

I am one elaborate crush



we cry petals as the void is singing

you are the dark that holds the stars

in intimate distance

that spun the whirling, whirling world into existence



let's meet at the confluence

where you flow into me

and one breath swirls between our lungs.



- Drew Dellinger

Larry,

Just wanted to say thank you for posting the daily prose. While I have little history in the world of poetry, I find it helps wake up my brain each morning and provides me a brief reflection before I jump into the day. Thanks for the effort and sharing.

Have a great day.

John

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Losing Our Minds


Watching you
I notice
the way a life
narrows down
to such a few
simple things

Sunlight streaming in your window
to wrap you in a veil of warmth
a view of our pond
and the distant wooded hills
once apples, now grapes
your fingers roaming the pages
of fading photographs
the comfort of familiar food
and a newspaper from your hometown

This morning
I found your purse
hidden at the bottom of your laundry basket
and felt
your fear of things
slipping away

Sometimes, you tell me
you don't mind
that you're losing your mind
"I'm not in any pain" you say
and all the while
I, in another room,
sit in silence, every morning
hoping to lose my mind

In the way Guatama Buddha
lost his

- Kay Crista

---

Old Man, Old Man

Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?

He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

- David Wagoner

Animals Are Passing from Our Lives
It’s wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I’m to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won’t meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes

that any moment I’ll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,
or that I’ll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.
- Philip Levine

The Great Winter Wood Pellet Rush of '07


Dropped the broom in mid-sweep
grabbed my breakfast bowl
forgot all else
and left home

a rush of adrenalin
drawing me to the store
a fever kindled in the instant of that call
“Come for those bags, while they last!”

Dashing in
wondering how many
dare I ask for? Six, ten?

Paid for the goods
precious seconds ticking by
cars revving in the yard
lined up for that last palette.

“Five bags apiece!”
quieted all questions
the hurried, satisfying thumps
landing in the truck.

Driving away with the catch
feeling triumphant in
taking so much—
more than my need.

Perhaps, the price is higher
than the tallest pines
lower than the earth's fiery bowels
wider than our appetites
as slender as the bonds
that bind us here.

And what if that same fever—
that same unfulfillable need—
were to grip and drive me
to the heaped palettes of truths
sitting unsold
in my own backyard?

- Raphael Block

Flowers for Robert Bly

on reading The Sibling Society


Once more, Robert Bly, you have disturbed the soil of my soul.
Once more, you have aimed your harrow
Straight down the row my mule hauled it.

Listen to me, crusty old man, cranky as a child,
Once more you have done your job
And your duty with your story of the stories.

I know you take a look at these wayside flowers,
Okay, but you pick them not.
One hand, and the plough aim falters.

- Bruce Moody

On Discovering a Butterfly

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer - and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
- Vladimir Nabokov

Valentines Day

　
The drive from the airport

took us two days.

We had to sample each other

in bedrooms and showers,

in hot-tubs, in the frilled thrill

of paid for rooms.


Weeks later, we did it in the car

like kids. It was awkward, I had forgotten

how a small car can restrict a wild dance

to a brief jerky minuet.

We hastily gathered ourselves

lest the young show up

with a camera.


Later still, we found an indented valley

in some hilly grass.

This Valentines Day

there will be a different kind of passion,

a love of wine and warm sheets,

an old movie to watch together.

- Eric Ashford

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Sonnets to Orpheus
Sonnet XIII, First Part,


Plump apple, smooth banana, melon, peach,
gooseberry…How all this affluence
speaks death and life into the mouth…I sense…
Observe it from a child’s transparent features

while he tastes. This comes from far away.
What miracle is happening in your mouth?
Instead of words, discoveries flow out
from the ripe fruit, astonished to be free.

Dare to say what “apple” truly is.
This sweetness that feels thick, dark, dense at first;
then, exquisitely lifted in your taste

grows clarified, awake and luminous,
double-meaninged, sunny, earthy, real -
Oh knowledge, pleasure - inexhaustible.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Yesterday

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

- W. S. Merwin

Snow Talk

So I said, “I don’t have a poem about snow

but maybe Snow, you got a poem about me?”

So Snow said, “You? You who hide out from me

in your always green, never freeze, home by the bay?”

So I said, “Hey, lighten up! You’re the first snow I’ve

seen in a long, long time. You caught me by surprise.

Suddenly everything white over night you know? ”

With an attitude that shocked me, Snow said,

“What’s wrong with white,

great overwhelming vistas of white?

White upon white ‘till you pray

for a touch of brown or blue!

But not today buddy, no not today.

Today you are mine, all mine

At fifty-five hundred feet.

Look at me.

Am I not beautiful?

Do I not take your breath away

doing what I do?

I am snow.

Perfectly impartial to all who know me

Yes, even to you who avoid me.

I am snow you fool

And I am beautiful."


- Doug von Koss

Mt. Shasta, CA October 2010

La Niña

Finally, the satellite image showed a storm nearing the Pacific coast. January and February had been dry with record heat, so there might not be many more chances to experience the fierce majesty. If she jumped in her camper van now, she might get to the coast before the front made landfall.

Passing the Cape Fear Café in Duncans Mills she imagined a sign: “Now Entering the Pacific Watershed” and felt a rush of anticipation. She parked her camper high on a bluff above Jenner-by-the-Sea right at the rim of the continent.

alone and all one
wave and ocean surge ashore
smoothing the edge

From the wild horizon it arrived: the electricity in thunderheads, rain then hail pelting the roof, the camper buffeted by gusts. It was nature throwing a pebble at her window. She donned her rain gear and scrambled down to play with the driftwood.

stormy beach

thousands of shore birds

not many flying

And later, all dry and snug with a hot-water bottle, she gazes west and daydreams of dolphins and dead zones, salmon and redwoods, Japan and Zen temples. “To find the self, you must lose the self,” Dogen said.

surfing below the surface

stories rise from silence

-- images in a darkroom


And there, in the eye of a storm on the Pacific Rim, she loses herself in a place that knows no yearning and refuses nothing -- like a cliff or an ocean.


- andrew zarrillo

On Hearing a Poem Recited, Not Read


The poem flew at me
Little darts, pricking my skin
piercing my belly, my arms, my eyes
Flew at me on swift, black wings
trailing a smoky blur past my ears
Flew all around me
furious, then curiously quiet

No words sounded like words
read from a page
They had been lifted
the night before, years before
Flipped up, one by one
letter by letter let fall
on the tongue and dissolved
like melting snowflakes trickling down
through the heart, into the belly
to the toes, the fingertips
Pulled back through the blood
through the brain
down into the back of the throat
into the cheeks and spit out
Little darts of words
big wings of words
charging the air all around me
There were no words, only language
Tongue moved by muscle and blood

The poem entered me and exited
leaving little points of pain and light
soft feathery strokes on my skin and hair
Leaving me empty of words

- Christine Walker

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

The Kama Sutra of Kindness: Position Number 3

It's easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else
wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs
you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups
you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side
there's never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back
you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it
burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun

- Mary Mackey

13 Ways To Look At A Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

- Wallace Stevens

My first experience of performed poetry

Of course there was alway the doggerel
that Uncle Dan would recite
when he visited from Seattle
or school assignments
but I am not talking about that.


The first time I sought out the experience of poetry
was at the Berkeley Little Theater
and Robert Bly and Gary Snyder presented.

It was 1972 the Viet Nam War was burning
and I had never heard of Robert Bly.
He presented "Silence in the Snowy Field"
In contrast he presented "Teeth Mother, Naked at Last"
a hate poem, a genere that I,
a Scot with Viking blood
love to this day.

Robert walked and flew his hands
and expectorated with vehemence....
He meant it.
And I, a recently discharged vet
who had become a conscientious objector
secluded myself on Mount Tamalpias
and came down once a week only
to draft council
and this was my first venture out
of my routine for months.... I crossed the bay.

Gary Snyder, author of Axe Handles
was the one I went to see.
Both he and I loved the woods
had sailed in the merchant marine
and had buddhist leanings.
Yet he read from a book.

His words were even sounding
though profound as always
but presented as
an assignment, completed.
Not as a passionate explosion
of viscera, spit and gesticulation
like Robert as they alternated poems.

Gary's presentation was honest
forthright, and the way I now read
my poems, which I did not begin
to write for another 20 years.

But to capture the poem in the blood
not in desiccated text
That is my dream
and my expectation of myself

For poems are like sperm.
There are so many of them.
the good ones, though
I want to commit
to my living being.

- David Bean

Egrets

Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that's how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets - - -
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them - - -
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.

- Mary Oliver

The Woman at the Washington Zoo


The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

- Randall Jarrell

Requiem for Christchurch

Earthquakes destroy the past.

I never thought I would live
long enough to witness
the end of my city
but Tuesday lunch time, a cold grey day,
the earth, like a hunting cat, pounced.
We tossed and tumbled,
with our houses see-sawing under us.

Initially, our city was built
on a swamp; when the earth
split open, water and silt
bubbled out through the cracks,
pot-holing pavements and roads.

The cathedral, where we prayed
to God, that same cathedral
collapsed -one wall and its spire,
on to unwitting passers-by.

Yet it is quite surreal;
my garden is still a wonderland,
even though half a block away,
everything is in disarray.

I mourn for the lost, the maimed, the dead.
I mourn for our grieving city.

- Diana Neutze


(Diana Neutze is a poet living in Christchurch NZ.)

Loving Humans
For Aung San Suu Kyi

Loving humans
Is tricky
Sometimes
A slap
In the face
Is all you get
For doing it
Just right.

Loving humans is a job
Like any other
Only
More
Bumps
On the way
To work
Which is full on
All the time.

Loving humans
Makes us
Want
To invite
Ourselves to tea
With rancid
Dictators
We think we
Can convince
Of our
Story’s side
While all
They think
About
While
We sit & dream
Is how
They can
Get away
With
Poisoning
Our tea.

And how
If only they
Had
Enough tea
Already
Brewed
They could
Waterboard us
To death
With it.

Loving humans
Means
Writing poems & songs
Novels & plays, slogans, chants
& protest signs
Our critics
Want
To stone
Us for
While
We think of
Them
As people
Under different
Circumstances
We might
Be able
To help.

There is
Indeed
A Buddha
In
Every one
Of us
Loving humans
With all
Our clear &
Unmistakable
Reluctance
To evolve
Makes this hard
For most humans
To see.

But not you.

- Alice Walker

A Winter Day

Snow on the roof.

All afternoon I read in the sunlit room
and jotted down words now and then,
troubled now and then by thoughts
of how long
the light would last. Now

shadows have amassed
at the feet of objects, and soon
the unmade bed, the scattered papers, the books
in rows and piles, the cups of tea gone cold,
the plates and crumbs from the lunch we shared,

will all look stranded in the rising dark,
like wreckage from a ship spoiled by storm.
Until I turn on a lamp
and see

the heart's sphere squared to make a room,
the mind's love entrusted
to a few words on a page.

- Li-Young Lee

It Is March
It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun
- W. S. Merwin

How to Create an Agnostic

Singing with my son, I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.

It was dumb luck,
But my son, in awe, thought

That I’d created the electricity.
He asked, “Dad, how’d you do that?”

Before I could answer, thunder shook the house
And set off neighborhood car alarms.

I thought that my son, always in love with me,
Might fall to his knees with adoration.

“Dad,” he said. “Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?

The one that looks like a giant owl?”
O, my little disciple, my one-boy choir,

I can’t do that because your father,
Your half-assed messiah, is afraid of fire.

- Sherman Alexie

What We Need

The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,

which is why
every day

we need

a little poem
of kindness,

a small song
of peace

a brief moment
of joy.

- David Budbill

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

Young Man

I seemed always standing
before a door
to which I had no key,
although I knew it hid behind it
a gift for me.

Until one day I closed
my eyes a moment, stretched
then looked once more.
And not surprised, I did not mind it
when the hinges creaked
and, smiling, Death
held out his hands to me.

- John Haines
(1924-2011)

Listening to the Koln Concert


After we had loved each other intently,
we heard notes tumbling together,
in late winter, and we heard ice
falling from the ends of twigs.

The notes abandon so much as they move.
They are the food not eaten, the comfort
not taken, the lies not spoken.
The music is my attention to you.

And when the music came again,
later in the day, I saw tears in you r eyes.
I saw you turn your face away
so that the others would not see.

When men and women come together,
how much they have to abandon! Wrens
make their nests of fancy threads
and string ends, animals

abandon all their money each year.
What is that men and women leave?
Harder then wrens' doing, they have
to abandon their longing for the perfect.

The inner nest not made by instinct
will never be quite round,
and each has to enter the nest
made by the other imperfect bird.

- Robert Bly

Report of the Fourteenth Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group

This is how things begin to tilt into change,
how coalitions are knit from strands of hair,
of barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut,
how people ease into action arguing each inch,
but the tedium of it is watching granite erode.

Let us meet to debate meeting, the day, the time,
the length. Let us discuss whether we will sit
or stand or hang from the ceiling or take it lying
down. Let us argue about the chair and the table and
the chairperson and the motion to table the chair.

In the room fog gathers under the ceiling and thickens
in every brain. Let us form committees spawning
subcommittees all laying little moldy eggs of reports.
Under the grey fluorescent sun they will crack
to hatch scuttling lizards of more committees.

The Pliocene gathers momentum and fades.
the earth tilts on its axis. More and more snows
fall each winter and less melt each spring.
A new ice age is pressing the glaciers forward
over the floor. We watch the wall of ice advance.

We are evolving into molluscs, barnacles
clinging to wood and plastic, metal and smoke
while the stale and flotsam-laden tide of rhetoric
inches up the shingles and dawdles back.
This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,

to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.

- Marge Piercy

Ancient Egyptian Love
*** Translated by Michael V. Fox
*
This love is as good
as oil and honey to the throat,
as linen to the body,
as fine garments to the gods,
as incense to worshippers when they enter in,
as the little seal-ring to my finger.
*
It is like a ripe pear in a man's hand.
It is like the dates we mix with wine.
It is like the seeds the baker adds to bread.
*
We will be together even when old age comes.
*
And the days in between
will be food set before us,
dates and honey, bread and wine.
*
The poem/song dates from the 19th or 20th Egyptian dynasty (ca. 1300-1100 B.C.E.).* It was found written in hieroglyphics on a vase.
*
*The poem was translated by Michael V. Fox, currently professor of Hebrew & Semitic studies at the U of Wisconsin in Madison.*

An African Elegy

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of the earth.
There are things that burn me now
Which turn golden when I am happy.
Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things
And that we never curse the air when it is warm
Or the fruit when it tastes so good
Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters?
We bless things even in our pain.
We bless them in silence.
That is why our music is so sweet.
It makes the air remember.
There are secret miracles at work
That only Time will bring forth.
I too have heard the dead singing.
And they tell me that
This life is good
They tell me to live it gently
With fire, and always with hope.
There is wonder here
And there is surprise
In everything the unseen moves.
The ocean is full of songs.
The sky is not an enemy.
Destiny is our friend.

- Ben Okri

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

- Robinson Jeffers

Just Enough
*
Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushrooms for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind
*
- Nanao Sakaki

Winter Stars

I went out at night alone;
The young blood flowing beyond the sea
Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—
I bore my sorrow heavily.

But when I lifted up my head
From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,
Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.

- Sara Teasdale

The following five poems from Japan were translated by Kenneth Rexroth.


I can no longer tell dream from reality.
Into what world shall I awake
from this bewildering dream?

— Akazome Emon



The fireflies' light
How easily it goes on
How easily it goes out again.

— Chine-Jo


The crying plovers
on darkening Narumi
Beach, grow closer, wing
To wing, as the moon declines
Behind the rising tide.

— Fujiwara No Sueyoshi



I loathe the seas of being
And not being
And long for the mountain
Of bliss untouched by
The changing tides.

— Anonymous



If only the world
Would remain this way,
Some fishermen
Drawing a little rowboat
Up the riverbank.

— Minamoto No Sanetomo