Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

The Optimist’s Bag

It slouches on the foyer table
tries to look invisible
but its innards jive
like a troop of spider monkeys
playing Twister in a pillow slip.
Like Pinocchio in the cavern of Monstruo’s belly
they holler, let us out!
Desire is the loudest.
It rattles the buckles from
deep within the leather folds.
Loneliness picks up the chorus
in call and response.

Next the twins, tenderness and hope—
smooth white hands soft as school girls’—
pick at the lock
while tongues of connection
slide over the gaping rim
and force it open
like a bellows pushing air
fanning the lilies of lust.

Your eyes track the play-by-play
like dreamtime pupils.
When you reach for it
the bag plays dead.

- Sandra Anfang

Wedded to the Darkness

Only when the storm comes
roaring off the wild California coast
bringing its raging rain and wind
swirling around the edges of my fears
can I know the power
of the magnificent roots of the old oak tree
clinging like a net of tangled hair
twisted and knotted into the earth
wedded to the dark
holding the swaying branch-laden tree
firmly to its source.
Only then can I feel
and bow down to the darkness
to the fertile terrain
where life is held and nourished
Only then can I know
I depend on the darkness for light.


- Judith Shiner

Otter Sight

After three days of rain
the Laguna is doing its old job -
keeping the river from flooding downstream.
A vast sheet of water welcomes
incoming flights of mallards and grebes.
Egrets poke around the margins,
their serpentine stealth yielding
bounties of frogs and crawdads.

Ripples spreading around the bend of the current
herald their whiskered faces:
the otters I have long heard of
but never, until now, seen.

The new neighbor says
“I bought the place for the view.”
I say “You got a good one.”

- Larry Robinson

Millennium blessing

There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us to surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.

- Stephen Levine

Added my Illustration & typography to the poem.

Dear Sebastopol -

Hard not to get dizzy, here, under tides of scent -
how they grade and terrace the air.

salt thick tang of wet earth fat with limestone
against sweet rot of wind falls.

Pine sap town built on stolen ground.
Wagon rutted streets. Hills once lush

with redwood and oak, cleared
to the root for acres of orchards.

Century-wide berths of scrub oaks
smoldering in the Laguna de Santa Rosa

A train that carried its screaming
weight down Main Street for nearly 100 years.

But the WPA mural on the post office wall
still frames the hard won promise:

neat rows of apple trees
flanked by white chicken coops.

Once, your accepted story swallowed me under its bell glass sky.

Now I wake slowly. Learn to waver
in the air above what history we’ve learned,

sense what’s pushing up underneath.

- Iris Jamahl Dunkle

O, Pilgrim!

O pilgrim, where have you been?
Where are you now?

While you have been searching the world
the Beloved has been here all along
waiting for you.

Let the caravan carry you home
to your deepest heart’s desire.
The treasure you sought was buried in your own garden.

Come home, o wanderer, and behold the face in the mirror.
Look behind the eyes and see the One
who has been searching for you.

You are seen;
you are known
and you are beloved.

If your seeking has brought you here at last,
you know that there is nowhere else to go
and nothing more to say.

- Jellaludin Rumi
(version by Larry Robinson)

At a Workshop with Bill Plotkin ~ a poem for the beloved

Called to the gate
chain-linked to the long wooden fence
running along the road into Commonmweal

I wanted to climb over you,
sit atop the highest bar,
remembering rodeos
and other echoes of the forgotten West

But instead I unhooked the chain
and sat beside you, inside the enclosed field,
drawn also by the standing poles
and the mysterious wires anchoring them
to the ground and to each other

Such a powerful symbol of our (post)modern industrial culture

Let me love YOU!
You too must be alive,
carrying within yourself
some longing for wholeness
underneath the layers of power, greed and domination
that have so distorted the promise of your gift
(thinking of Rilke and how the ore wants to go back into the mountain)

Just so, the wires and wirelesses of our global interconnection
want to reach into our deepest beings
to touch our deeper longings

Blessings and gratitude
to those heroes of our day,
setting free the dirty secrets
of our wars - against each other
and against the earth

The Chelsea Mannings and the Julian Asanges,
the Edward Snowdens,
the warriors of the West,
sparking our imaginations
with the fires of freedom
and the passion for justice, integrity and honor

Respect for ALL beings

May we discover, in the depths of our own beings,
the way forward into a world that celebrates
connection, wholeness,
ringing forth a song of joy
over the wires that weave in and out
of our lives here together
on this most glorious earth


- Debora Hammond

Burning

Midday sun a smear,
a shimmering smudge burning behind
slate skies, burning
through hopelessness and hope.

There is always burning.
Somewhere fields are burning to clear
for crops: cane, corn, poppies.
Spirits burn in defiance of helplessness.

Burning somewhere
palaces, markets, monuments,
broad hallways, humble homes alight
with someone’s certainty.

Always burning somewhere,
Bodies burn against bulldozer
blades poised to bury lies, secrets. Bodies
in Poland, Guatemala, Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine.

There is always burning,
libraries burn, also oil wells,
dreams, outrage and grief
Pushed to the grave’s edge.

In America and Africa
children burn with hunger, confusion,
mothers burn with sorrow, outrage.
Grandmothers gaze at the sun,

imagine a future
poised on the sun’s corona, tumbling
End over dazzling end
until time itself ends.

- Rebecca del Rio

A Zero-Circle


Be helpless and dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.


Then a stretcher will come
from grace to gather us up.


We are too dulleyed to see the beauty.
If we say "Yes we can," we¹ll be lying.


If we say "No, we don¹t see it,"
that "No" will behead us
and shut tight our window into spirit.


So let us not be sure of anything,
beside ourselves, and only that, so
miraculous beings come running to help.


Crazed, lying in a zero-circle, mute,
we will be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, "Lead us."


When we¹ve totally surrendered to that beauty,
we¹ll become a mighty kindness.


- Jelalludin Rumi
Mathnawi IV, 3748-3754
(Translation by Coleman Barks)

The Guest House


This being human is a guest house.

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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)

What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?


I don’t want to change
my thoughts.

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I want to change
the way I think.
I want to think
in images, in stories
spun as threads
arising long and slow
out of culture and
out of the Grandmother Spider
of indigenous mind.


I want to learn
to live in the old ways,
the ways of spirit.
I want to see
the signs and the
deep, precise wisdom
of the true ones –
ancestors, elders, any and all
trying to inform us that
there is a way -
there is a way
to heal,
there is a way
to see,
there is a way
to change direction,
there is a way
to give the children
what they need
to be safe
to be listening
to be healthy
to be whole.


I, too,
want to be whole
all the way into
death and, yes,
I’ll say it,
beyond death,
beyond it but not beyond
the cycle of being -
the ring, the hoop of
being together.
This is the place where
Love remains, where
Love sustains, where
Love comes
into and through
all things.
Love is spirit
flowing into the life
of the world.
Knowing this
I am left with a question
to pose to myself:
What would an
indigenous grandmother do?

- Maya Spector

A different format using my typography and design, the image is modified from an unattributed Pinterest post.

Angels


This is how an angel comes

out of the earth, upwards

from the underworld

when everybody thought

they came from the light wings

of the sky - no

they are massive -

on nights of rain and sleet, split

the soil, splash and muddy the grass

wingspans wide as lakes

wearing mud armour, they crawl

full length up rivers and streams

dam ditches, seep through drains

penetrate walls, barns, chicken coops

unsettle bats with wing-beats

that shake down trees -

remind us, cradled in our prayers

how we like to remain dry, sheltered.

This is how angels come

mouths full of earth

spitting verses

of poetry.

- Miriam Darlington

Wood and Steel

first day at sea
The steel deck hums

Rolling ocean bringing back dreams
Of wooden ships and creaking ropes

Wood once home to squirrel and bird
Roots knowing darkness and moisture

This steel ship knows no life
But for the guest in my cabin

A ladybug has stowed away with me

I place her in the steel drawer
Of the steel desk
On the steel ship

I bring her water
And bits of food
This ambassador of all living things
Trapped in a cold steel world

That bug, a living icon
Impossibly red with magic black spots
I fell in love with her
And all creation at the same time

But she did not survive

Heartbroken in mid-Atlantic
A burial at sea
Inside a matchbox coffin

The only wood I could find


- Brian Narelle

The Night She Danced


A smoky basement in Seville,
cigar plumes hanging low,
a single bulb
with a bent green shade
lights it all.

Underneath the singer’s bleeding voice
an ancient rhythm throbbed
from an old guitar and there
on the bottom step,
something leaned
against the wall.

It was then Delilia stood up
on the pitted mahogany floor,
and danced the whole history of Andalusia
out of the night and into the room.

All those times of exquisite pain
and painful joy.
Like the night the grandmother died
and the grandchild was born in Favencia.
And that year that the Guadalimar
leaped from it’s banks and carried away
the lemon orchard and the mule.
And the time the bull with the broken horn
crashed through Alejandro’s bodega
just before siesta.
And the time the wine turned to vinegar.
And the Christmas mass when the priest died.

It was all there.
The winter shawl made by Maria Helena
for the statue of Our Lady.
And the perfect olives grown by Tio Miguel
on his dry and scorched huerto.
The music caught it all in a flaming cauldron
of blazing heels and chattering castanets.

Delilia, consumed by Duende, was danced
by the joy the sorrow, the pleasure the pain,
the sugar the lemon, the life and the death,
the laugh and the scream. The pain and the fire.
Nothing escaped that pulsing dance.
We could all die! Santo Padre! Death is near!

Then a sudden dark silence
caught it all by the throat.
Madre de dios! What had she done?

Delilia’s last step
had smashed it all
without remorse.

Death was there that night
slinking nearer the singer’s heart
but Death left the basement
with empty arms.
No match for the Duende in the room
the night Della danced flamenco.


- Doug von Koss

Wonderful poem, Larry. Here's a similar one from R. M. Rilke, translated by C. F. MacIntyre:

SPANISH DANCER

As in the hand a match glows, swiftly white
before it bursts in flame and to all sides
licks its quivering tongues: within the ring
of spectators her wheeling dance is bright,
nimble, and fervid, twitches and grows wide.

And suddenly is made of pure fire.

Now her glances kindle the dark hair;
she twirls the floating skirts with daring art
into a whirlwind of consuming flame,
from which her naked arms alertly strike,
clattering like fearful rattlesnakes.

Then, as the fire presses her too closely,
imperiously she clutches it and throws it
with haughty gestures to the floor and watches
it rage and leap with flames that will not die--
until, victorious, surely, with a sweet
greeting smile, and holding her head high,
she tramples it to death with small, firm feet.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Night She Danced...

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Berryman


I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

- W.S. Merwin

Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space

May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss

May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away

May you integrate the wisdoms of your passage

May you feel the sacred burden of your own life in your arms

May you treat yourself with exquisite kindness and patience

May you find peace in your cocoon . . . acceptance and surrender

May you be transformed by your own darkness and rise renewed

- Kay Crista

TheSoldiers In The Garden


After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda’s garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.


The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.


For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the solders
vanish from the garden.


- Martín Espada

Touch the Air Softly


Now touch the air softly, step gently, one, two ...
I'll love you 'til roses are robin's egg blue;
I'll love you 'til gravel is eaten for bread,
And lemons are orange, and lavender's red.


Now touch the air softly, swing gently the broom.
I'll love you 'til windows are all of a room;
And the table is laid, And the table is bare,
And the ceiling reposes on bottomless air.


I'll love you 'til heaven rips the stars from his coat,
And the moon rows away in a glass-bottomed boat;
And Orion steps down like a river below,
And earth is ablaze, and oceans aglow.


So touch the air softly, and swing the broom high.
We will dust the grey mountains, and sweep the blue sky:
And I'll love you as long as the furrow the plough,
As however is ever, and ever is now.


- William Jay Smith

The New Song


For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song


- W.S.Merwin

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee


I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive


- N. Scott Momaday

Quarantine, 1918

There were towns that knew about the flu before it arrived; they had time to imagine the germs on a stranger’s skirts, to see how death could be sealed in an envelope, how a fever could bloom in the evening, and take a life overnight. A few villages, deep in the mountains, posted guards on their roads, and no one was allowed to come or go, not even a grandmother carrying a cake; no mail was accepted and all the words and packages families sent to one another went unopened, unanswered. Trains were told not to stop, so they glowed for a moment before swaying towards some other place. The food at the corner store never came from out of town and no one went to see a distant auntie or state fair. For awhile, the outside world existed in imagination, in memory, in books or suitcases, deep in closets. There was nothing but the town itself, hiding from what was possible, and the children cutting dolls from paper, their scissors sharp. - Faith Shearin

Storm

rain drops strike
batter black wood
spark leap collapse
mirrors of sky

cypher of lights
a deluge
in intricate wild
steps of rain

the wind takes rest
in bright glass
quieting pools
dimple daintily

sinews of clouds
open the sky to view

but soon the storm curls
this corner room a friend
beating and gusting
these windows now


- Kevin Pryne

Bedtime


We are a meadow where the bees hum,
mind and body are almost one


as the fire snaps in the stove
and our eyes close,


and mouth to mouth, the covers
pulled over our shoulders,


we drowse as horses drowse afield,
in accord; though the fall cold


surrounds our warm bed, and though
by day we are singular and often lonely.


- Denise Levertov

Lines for Winter


Tell yourself
as it get cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you found yourself -
inside the dome of dark
or under the crackling white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tunes your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.


- Mark Strand

The man pictured has terminal lung cancer, he quit smoking 15 years ago but had no chest x-rays during that period, when he did —it was too late.

I'll send him Mark Strand's poem "Lines for Winter", now illustrated with his image.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Lines for Winter...

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Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already; almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason --
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --
then pushed her over the edge into the river.


- William Stafford

The Powwow at the End of the World


I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.


- Sherman Alexie