Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Proclamation


Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.
Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;
Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free - despite all
fire and anger and fear;
Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling - a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.


- Kim Stafford

Rise and Fall - Larry Robinson

Rise and Fall

Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.

Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.

Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.

Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.

Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.

- Larry Robinson

perfect.

Oooh, great one, Larry!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Rise and Fall - Larry Robinson


Rise and Fall


Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.


Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.


Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.


Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.


Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.


Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.


Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.


- Larry Robinson

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Song

There are those who are trying to set fire to the world,
we are in danger,
there is time only to work slowly,
there is no time not to love.

- Deena Metzger

To Those Who Have Lost Everything

crossed
in despair
many deserts
full of hope

carrying
their empty
fists of sorrow
everywhere

mouthing
a bitter night
of shovels
and nails

“you’re nothing
you’re shit
your home’s
nowhere”—

mountains
will speak
for you

rain
will flesh
your bones

green again
among ashes
after a long fire

started in
a fantasy island
some time ago

turning
Natives
into aliens

- Francisco X. Alarcón

Every Revolution Needs Fresh Poems

Every revolution needs fresh poems
that is the reason
poetry cannot die.
It is the reason poets
go without sleep
and sometimes without lovers
without new cars
and without fine clothes
the reason we commit
to facing the dark
and
resign ourselves, regularly, to the possibility
of being wrong.
Poetry is leading us.
It never cares how we will
be held by lovers
or drive fast
or look good
in the moment;
but about how completely
we are committed
to movement
both inner and outer;
and devoted to transformation
and to change.


- Alice Walker

The Ripening

This Living
has softened the hard fruit
of my being

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

Let me not
fall from the branch
ripe but untasted

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

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

But,
if fall I must
untasted
melting into the earth

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

the essential elements
of my being

- Kay Crista

Africa revisited

Tell me about your trip to Africa, the liv ely wild creatures inhabiting that continent.
Remind me again of how they appeared to you.
Just another day in the life for them, A small miracle for you.

You hike dusty African hills with no guarantee that you will be invited in, to observe their world.
Will you be welcomed to a dappled glimpse of fur and chiseled teeth?
Alone at night, will you be somewhat disturbed by distant roaring base sounds heard instead of words?

A profound gift of savannah life is handed to you, on an earth l y platter.
Your easy presence is considered in a flash then filed away, as
neither predator nor prey, just a heart beat in the distance.

Tell me again about your trip to Africa, deep jungle's roar at night, hyena's fulsome laughter carried on slight wind.
Remind me once again of how the unbidden occurs whether we allow it or not,
Remind me too of the ways grace rains down on each of us lively wild creatures, uninvited and ever-present.

- Ann Krinard

To My Favorite Seventeen Year-Old High School Girl

Do you realize that if you had started
building the Parthenon, on the day you were born
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that alone,
so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.
You’re a love for simply being yourself.
But did you know that, at your age Judy Garland
was pulling down $150,000 per picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,
and Blase Pascal had cleaned up his room?
No, wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life
after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom, or, at least, pick up all your socks.
For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey
was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,
but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,
four operas, and two complete masses as a youngster.
But of course that was in Austria at the height
of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you are special by just being you,
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

- Billy Collins

Prayer For The Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through the wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
in our mind so be it.

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave, and aware
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep—he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars—and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.

so be it.

- Gray Snyder

Blessing The Bones

I sit alone at the kitchen table,
barbecued chicken bones lie heaped
like dead soldiers on my plate.
I lick the sauce from the bones.
I feel carnal and content
and then I think of grandma.
I could be her as I enjoy
this solitary meal.

She is dressed in a long straight skirt,
a short-sleeved cotton blouse.
Her apron is spotted, her stockings
sag down around her ankles, her toes
poke through worn slippers.
I watch her soak crusts of bread
in pan drippings, take her fork and balance
bits of lamb and potatoes on top.
She always ate last, but best of all.

I think of her long, un-mothered life -
just twelve when she boarded
the boat to Ellis Island, a child
sent alone by her family to seek a better life.
She was not blue-blood, never lost
her accent or peasant ways,
heard American neighbors call her
immigrant or less.

I think of her homeland under seige.
I could be dying there now,
our home downed by mortar shells.
I could be eating rationed bread,
the only bones those of slaughtered sons.
I could be cleaning a daughter's ravaged flesh.

I want to cry out to grandma,
cry out so the heavens will open
and angels bring her closer.
I want to hold her, smell her skin,
bury my head in her feeble shoulders,
run my fingers through her white hair,
kiss away her sadness.

I want to cover her table
with a white Damask cloth,
set out a feast, exchange
her black babooshka for the
milliner's finest red felt hat.
I want to thank her for my life,
say that I understand her sacrifice.

I want to bless her bones.

- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Gratitude


What did you notice?

The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;

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the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

What did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;
the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;
the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the
pale green wand;
at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid
beauty of the flowers;
then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,
her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue, her
recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her
sturdy legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;
the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;
the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;
the tall, blank banks of sand;
the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;
the sea and its triangles;
the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green breast of the hummingbird;
the eye of the pond;
the wet face of the lily;
the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;
the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;
the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve
of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

- Mary Oliver

Family Reunion


The week in August you come home,
adult, professional, aloof,
we roast and carve the fatted calf
—in our case homegrown pig, the chine
garlicked and crisped, the applesauce
hand-pressed. Handpressed with greengage wine.


Nothing is cost effective here.
The peas, the beets, the lettuces
handsown, are raised to stand apart.
The electric fence ticks like the slow heart
of something we fed and bedded for a year,
then killed with kindness’s one bullet
and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering.


In winter we lure the birds with suet,
thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat.
Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring
of wire that keeps raccoons from the corn
to the gouged pine table that we lounge around,
distressed before any of you was born.


Benign and dozy from our gluttonies,
the candles down to stubs, defenses down,
love leaking out unguarded the way
juice dribbles from the fence when grounded
by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe,
how eloquent, how beautiful you seem!


Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,
ballooning to overfill our space,
the almost-parents of your parents now.
So briefly having you back to measure us
is harder than having let you go.


- Maxine Kumin

They've lost it, lost it,
and their children
will never even wish for it-
and I am afraid
that the whole tribe's in trouble,
the whole tribe is lost-
because the sun keeps rising
and these days
nobody sings


- Aaron Kramer

Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

- Richard Wilbur

Listening to the Koln Concert

After we had loved each other intently,

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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

Love After Love

The day will come when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say,
sit here, eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine, give bread.
Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

- Derek Walcott

This Making of a Whole Self


This making of a whole self takes
such a very long time: pieces are not
sequential nor our supplies. We work here,
then there, hold up tattered fabric to the light.
Sew past dark, intent. Use all our thread.

Sleeves may come before length;
buttons, before a rounded neck.
We sew at what most needs us,
and as it asks, sew again.

The self is not one thing, once made,
unaltered. Not midnight task alone, not
after other work. It’s everything we come
upon, make ours: all this fitting of
what-once-was and has-become.

- Nancy Shaffer

Fog Drip

Fog drip, they say,

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replenishes the aquifer.
Redwood needles pull
moisture from the mist,
guiding it down to the roots -
and below.

Even in the driest years
these patient old ones
remain ever green.

Some elders are like that.
They find the goodness there is
and draw it down,
sustaining themselves
while feeding the deeper stream.

They don’t demand attention;
they don’t seek profit or approval.
Usually they don’t even know
they are doing this.
Do the redwoods know - or care -
where the water goes?

Francis of Assisi called down grace
by the simple act of gratitude.
The foxes and the sparrows
drank deeply from his fog drip.

- Larry Robinson

A Thank You Message Written for her Family at Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, my beloved family.

As this time of year rolls around and we look at what we're thankful for,
I'd have to say that what I'm most grateful for is my family.
We are all here because we are the descendants of something greater than our own lives,
and that is our family's lineage.
We hold our place in a sequence of lives,
a lineage of people who knew pain and joy, hope and despair,
who were capable of greatness and generosity, as well as pettiness and spite.
You are the next generations.
You hold the key to the future and the link to memory.
You are the living legacy of all the ancestors who have gone before you.
Although much of our history and its players remain unknown to us,
never forget that there is an invisible line of men and women who
stand behind each of you and stretches back through time, farther than we can see.
This moment is the culmination of every thought, action, feeling and
circumstance of all of their lives added to all of your grandparents' lives,
your parents' lives and now your lives.
In this season of gratitude and remembering, I ask you to take a moment
to consider your place in this lineage, to imagine what the faces must look like
that stand silently behind you, to consider what their dreams may have been and
how you are the answer to their prayers.
Then look forward, to the children who come after you, to their children and beyond.
What would you like to leave as a legacy for them?
What prayers beat in your heart for them?
For my part, I know that you are the living answers to my prayers.
On behalf of all of your ancestors may I say, Thank you for choosing us.

- Diana Del Drago

Holiday Poem

Everyone wants a piece of you.
Even the elderly oaks, their
branches draped with lichen
lace, are reaching long
limbs towards your body
as you pass.
The demands are ceaseless,
it seems. The ways to say
yes, change direction,
possibly crumble. Still,
you let the branches brush you.
Until you hear the rushing
of the downhill stream,
the wide green hand of the
mountain letting go, letting forth.
It asks nothing.
You lean into,
you follow
that sound.

- Amy Elizabeth Robinson

Meeting The Light Completely

Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
"What fools we were, not to have seen."

- Jane Hirshfield

December 7^th Prayer

Like a distressed baby,
crying in an empty room,
I used to pray.

Now I just wait expectantly
till clarity comes,
often vexing me greatly
with what it has to say,
as if daring me to stare at the sun.

Or, slowly cooking a thick slab of puzzlement,
avoiding all recipes’ tedium,
I keep turning and turning
till I get a well-seared response
to a question that refuses to leave.

Sometimes I’m like a clumsy country doctor,
vainly trying to pin down a persistent pain’s true cause,
poking and prodding,
ineptly seeking to know what’s up,
only to find that what’s not up
is what I ought to seek.

Amazed that the head on collision of one sperm and one egg,
in the fierce run up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
led to the odd duck who bears my name,
I am lately bemused by the wondrous strangeness of it all,
and regret, ever so slightly, that no one can hear me when,
my solitary heart wishing that it were not so,
I yearn to say, “Thanks for all this blessing.”

- Bill Dickinson

Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper

The front page reports
120 soldiers were killed

the war was long
you get used to it

right next to this news
of a spectacular crime
with the killer’s photo

Mr. Cogito’s gaze
moves with indifference
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with great relish
into the quotidian macabre

a thirty-year-old farmworker
in a state of manic depression
murdered his own wife
and two small children

we are told the exact
way they were killed
the position of the bodies
and the other details

it’s no use trying to find
120 lost men on a map
a distance too remote
hides them like a jungle

they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero on the end
turns them into an abstraction

a theme for further reflection:
the arithmetic of compassion.

- Zbigniew Herbert

Lost in thought

I want to get lost in those thoughts
that continue expanding

way out over the clouds
rising into nests of stars

migrating across seas, flying
into wild new geographies of meaning.

I want to get carried away
from all that is manageable and trivial,

all that is self-defeating
all that shrivels the heart
binds the feet and shrink wraps a soul.

I want to get lost with those spacious thoughts
that amaze, like stories,

building syllable upon syllable,
word after word, until, in the end,

the plot gives way
to holy incomprehension,

I want to say yes to all
that bids us to the window
and across the door step

where rustling satin notes of sky
sing us into whole landscapes
of yet unspoken poetry.


- Judith Stone

There Is No Going Back


No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

- Wendell Berry

Races

You are a Brother
And a Sister
In the colors of Life
Some people believe
They are races
Human races
Whatever that may be
Races are for running
The competitive edge
Distrust and confusion
Leaving alterations
In innocent faces
We are natural Life
A part of Mother Earth's design
A blending of colorsTo make the difference
In the teaching
of meanings
We are colors in the family
of Life.

- John Trudell
(February 15, 1946 – December 8, 2015)

Thanks For Remembering Us

The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they're not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can't
throw out a gift we've never owned.

- Dana Gioia