Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Love Poem

Let me have just one more day,
let me have this day and let it not be my last.
Let me have just one more day to feel the sap in the stems,
to hear the language of birds and the wind,
one more day of light, one more day of turning,
one more day balanced on the precipice, one more day
to bask and revel, one more day of the exquisite pain,
one more day to risk a bit more, just one more day
to feel the tide’s pull, to be swept and tossed,
to fear the loss, one more day to empty and be bereft.

Let me have one more day that I might find you and
find myself in you, to allow the wonder of the dance,
one more day to reveal and conceal, one more day
without words to say what I can not tell you, one more day
to be willing, to allow time’s victory and defeat,
one more day carried on the upwelling, my body
salt in the tears, some kind of habitation, some kind of crystallization,
some kind of membrane between.

I don’t mean to be trite but
I love you like water loves gravity, like lungs love oxygen,
like the grasses with the breeze, like the torrents over the rocks.
I’m serious here. My gaze wants to linger longer on you.
I have not had enough of your demands. I have more of laughter to learn.

Nothing have I to offer but failing as best I can.
I rely on what I can not know.
This being should not be, for how can it be,
but given its apparentness, let it continue with me just one more day.

- Tim Hicks

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in the river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed,
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill -
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

​​​Charles Simic

Photo taken in St. Peters Village, PA.

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
rein 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

At first I thought No, not a stone. But if there's moonlight inside & I could be used to make sparks fly, then I'm with it!
Many thanks, Larry.
Janet

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in the river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed,
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill -
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

​​​Charles Simic

---

More Than You Gave

We have the town we call home wakening for dawn
which isn’t yet here but is promised, we have
our tired neighbors rising in ones and twos, we have
the sky slowly separating itself from the houses
to become the sky while the stars blink a last time
and vanish to make way for us to enter the great stage
of an ordinary Tuesday in ordinary time.

- Phillip Levine

The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney's translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

Psalm

Lord, there are creatures in the understory,
snails with whorled backs and silver boots,
trails beetles weave in grass, black rivers
of ants, unbound ladybugs opening their wings,

spotted veils and flame, untamed choirs

of banjo-colored crickets. and stained-glass cicadas.
Lord, how shall we count the snakes and frogs
and moths? How shall we love the hidden
and small? Mushrooms beneath leaves

constructing their death domes in silence,

their silken gills and mycelial threads, cap scales
and patches, their warts and pores. And the buried
bulbs that will bloom in spring, pregnant with flower
and leaf, sing Prepare for My Radiance, Prepare

for the Pageantry of My Inevitable Surprise.

These are the queendoms, the spines and horns,
the clustered hearts beating beneath our feet. Lord
though the earth is locked in irons of ice and snow
there are angels in the undergrowth, praise them.

- Dorianne Laux

The Ballad of Father O’Hart

Good Father John O'Hart
In penal days rode out
To a Shoneen who had free lands
And his own snipe and trout.
In trust took he John's lands;
Sleiveens were all his race;
And he gave them as dowers to his daughters.
And they married beyond their place.
But Father John went up,
And Father John went down;
And he wore small holes in his Shoes,
And he wore large holes in his gown.
All loved him, only the shoneen,
Whom the devils have by the hair,
From the wives, and the cats, and the children,
To the birds in the white of the air.
The birds, for he opened their cages
As he went up and down;
And he said with a smile, "Have peace now';
And he went his way with a frown.
But if when anyone died
Came keeners hoarser than rooks,
He bade them give over their keening;
For he was a man of books.
And these were the works of John,
When, weeping score by score,
People came into Colooney;
For he'd died at ninety-four.
There was no human keening;
The birds from Knocknarea
And the world round Knocknashee
Came keening in that day.
The young birds and old birds
Came flying, heavy and sad;
Keening in from Tiraragh,
Keening from Ballinafad;
Keening from Inishmurray.
Nor stayed for bite or sup;
This way were all reproved
Who dig old customs up.

- William Butler Yeats

Bleeder

By now I bet he’s dead which suits me fine,
but twenty-five years ago when we were both fifteen
and he was a camper and I a counselor
in a straight-laced Pennsylvania summer camp
for crippled and retarded kids, I’d watch

him sit all day by himself on a hill.
No trees, or sharp stones: he wasn’t safe to be around.
The slightest bruise and all his blood would simply drain away
It drove us crazy – first to protect him, then to see it happen

I would hang around him, picturing a knife or pointed stick
wondering how a small cut you’d have to make, then see the expectant face
of another boy watching me, and we each knew, how the other would like to see him bleed.

He made us want to hurt him so bad so much we hurt ourselves instead:
sliced fingers in craft class, busted noses in baseball, then joined at last mass wrestling matches beneath his hill, a tangle of crutches and braces, hammering at

each other to keep from harming him. I’d look up from slamming a kid in the gut and see him watching
with the empty blue eyes of children in sentimental paintings, and hope to see him frown or grin.
But there was nothing: as if he had already died.

Then after a week, they sent him home. Too much responsibility, the director said.
Hell, I bet the kid had skin like leather.
Even so, I’d lie in bed at night and think
of busting into his room with a sharp stick, lash

and break the space around his rose petal flesh,
while campers in bunks around me tossed and dreamt with this his pleasure: To make us cringe beneath

our wish to do damage? But then who cared?
We were living children, he the ghost
and what he gave us was the pleasure of being bad together.
He took us from our private spite and offered our bullying a common cause:

which is why we missed him, even though we wished him harm. When he went, we lost ours hared meanness and each of us was left to snarl his way to a separate future, eager to discover some new loser to link us in frailty again.

- Stephen Dobyns

The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things - earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars -
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality -
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant - to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

- Robinson Jeffers

Elemental

Is the word the work
Of someone who tills the blue field,
Unearths its dark plenitude
For the tight seed to release its thought
Into the ferment of clay,
Searching to earth the light
And come to voice in a word of grain
That can sing free in a breeze,
Bathe in the yellow well of the sun,
Avoid the attack of the bird,
And endure the red cell of the oven
Until memory leavens in the gift of bread?

- John O’Donohue

Agrigento Road

There a wind remains that I recall afire
within the manes of horses as they slanted
their way across the planes, a wind that chafes
the sandstone and erodes the very hearts
of derelict caryatids cast down
Onto the grass. Soul of antiquity
Gone gray with age and rage, turn back and lean
into that wind, breathe of the delicate moss
clothing those giants tumbled out of heaven.
How lonely what is left to you must be!
And worse: to break your heart to hear once more
that sound resound and dwindle out to sea
where Hesperus already streaks the dawn:
a sad jew's-harp reverberating through
the throat of that lone cartman as he slowly
ascends his moon-cleansed hill again through dark
murmurings of the Moorish olive trees.

- Salvatore Quasimodo

All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself. All the happiness in the world comes from seeking happiness for others.
- Shantideva

The Well of Grief

Those who will not
slip beneath the still surface
on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place where we cannot breathe
will never know the source
from which we drink the secret water,
cold and pure,
nor find in the darkness, glimmering,
the small round coins thrown by those
who wished for something else.

- David Whyte

Allegiances


It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked:
elves, goblins, trolls and spiders - we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

- William Stafford

The Song of the Lark

The song begins and the eyes are lifted
but the sickle points toward the ground
its downward curve forgotten in the song she hears
while over the dark wood, rising or falling
the sun lifts on cool air
the small body of a singing lark.

The song falls, the eyes raise, the mouth opens
and her bare feet on the earth have stopped.

Whoever listens in this silence, as she listens
will also stand opened, thoughtless, frightened
by the joy she feels, the pathway in the field
branching to a hundred more, no one has explored.

What is called in her rises from the ground
and is found in her body,
what she is given is secret even from her.

This silence is the seed in her
of everything she is
and falling through her body
to the ground from which she comes
it finds a hidden place to grow
and rises, and flowers, in old wild places
where the dark-edged sickle cannot go.

- David Whyte

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In My Father’s Garden

“Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway..."
- Tennyson


The unusual blue hyacinth came into bloom

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...5_23-25-08.png

unnoticed, and now the apple tree surprises me:
already in full flower.
The daffodils he planted here last fall
have all come up, bright gold in the March dusk.
He has had to leave his home, go
elsewhere to be cared for, and I’ve
come back here to look in on his garden.
Does the camelia care there’s no face at the window?
Do the birds in the branches miss the one who watched them?
Does it matter to the tulips that they opened up, then
faded, unappreciated and unseen?
For fifty years, his eyes admired this garden, every flower;'
I might expect to find their imprint on these petals.

- Carolyn Tipton

Remember


That to have the eyes of an artist,

That can be enough,

The ear of a poet,

That can be enough.

The soul of a human

Just pointed

In the direction of the Divine,

That can be more than enough.

I tell you this to remind myself.

Every gesture is an act of creation.

Even empty spaces and silence

Can be the wings and voices of angels.

- Michael Linfante

Becoming


Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.


- Jim Harrison
(1938-2016)

Would Live In Your Love

I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea, Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes; I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me, I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul as it leads.

- Sara Teasdale

Threshold

It has happened.
You thought you had some control
of your life
and that you were in a place
you understood
in a time that moved
from a past you knew
to a future that followed
in a more or less straight line.
But here you are at the edge
of a shore, the shallow waves
washing over your feet
taking the sand you stand on
away and suddenly you wonder
if all the ground beneath you
is disappearing.
You have stepped through the threshold.
The door closed and locked behind you.
You are on the other side.
You try to forget it, distract yourself,
but nothing works.
You check your messages.
The doctor’s office left a number
on your phone.
Is it is a blood test result,
survival rate for treatment,
or days left to live?
Now you are alone.
After the panic subsides you stand there
looking around.
Everything is fresh,
colors are vivid,
you can smell scents,
even subtle ones,
and your hearing is sharp.
You feel the breeze on your skin
and the tickle of hairs moving
across your brow.
You are pierced through
with the inexplicable joy
at having nothing.
[if !supportEmptyParas] [endif]
The sand forms around your foot
and the water wipes out all traces of your path.
Everywhere you turn there is something new
and the space around you
holds you gently
as it spills out and becomes
a part of the expanding world.
So many things are remarkable now.
Here is the freedom that always frightened you.
You have forgotten your name
and it does not matter.

- Newton Smith

Who By Fire

And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
and who by avalanche, who by powder,
who for his greed, who for his hunger,
and who shall I say is calling?

And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains, who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?

- Leonard Cohen

On the Pulse of Morning


A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Facedown in ignorance,
Your mouths spilling words

Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today,
You may stand upon me;
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.

Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.

Come, clad in peace,
And I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the Rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say they Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today.
Come to me,
Here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed-
On traveler, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers--desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede,
The German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
The Italian, the Hungarian, the Pole,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the Tree
I am yours--your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space
To place new steps of change
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me,
The Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
And into your brother's face,
Your country,
And say simply
Very simply
With hope--
Good morning.


- Maya Angelou

Extra, Extra

All hail the yellow flag of spring waving on the earth,
the fields striking light against the bell of the sky
in one triumphant peal announcing revolution.
Sing hail to the marching band in its rows of thousands,
hail to the buds on the branches like droplets of milk
about to bloom in a cup of black tea. Hail breakfast.

All praise to weeds, to fennel, thistle, miner's lettuce,
to foxtail and rattlesnake grass, horseradish, duckweed,
to moss and lichen, to goldenback fern. Praise outlaws.
Praise their persistence and their disregard for safety,
the way they pass through fences as if through open doors.
Praise to the uncountable numbers of their beauty.

And thanks for nothing. Thank you for this embarrassment
of useless gifts, this bright paper covering the box
of earth. Thank you for the fecund grave, the open mouth
of the river in constant, irresponsible flood.
Thanks for all that goes to waste, unasked for, unwanted:
this love, in such profusion, that does not care for us.

- Yosha Bourgea

On Clergymen Preaching Politics


Indeed, Sir Peter, I could wish, I own,
That parsons would let politics alone;
Plead, if they will, the customary plea,
For such like talk, when o'er the dish of tea:
But when they tease us with it from the pulpit,
I own, Sir Peter, that I cannot help it.


If on their rules a justice should intrench,
And preach, suppose a sermon, from the bench,
Would you not think your brother magistrate
Was a little touched in his hinder pate?
Now which is worse, Sir Peter, on the total
The lay vagary, or the sacerdotal?


In ancient times, when preachers preached indeed
Their sermons, ere the learned learnt to read,
Another spirit, and another life,
Shut the church doors against all party strife:
Since then, how often heard, from sacred rostrums,
The lifeless din of Whig and Tory nostrums!


'Tis wrong, Sir Peter, I insist upon't;
To common sense 'tis plainly an affront:
The parson leaves the Christian in a lurch,
Whene'er he brings his politics to church;
His cant, on either side, if he calls preaching,
The man's wrong-headed, and his brains want bleaching.


Recall the time from conquering William's reign,
And guess the fruits of such a preaching vein:
How oft its nonsense must have veered about,
Just as the politics were in, or out:
The pulpit governed by no gospel data,
But new success still mending old errata.


Were I a king (God bless me) I should hate
My chaplains meddling with affairs of state;
Nor would my subjects, I should think, be fond,
Whenever theirs the Bible went beyond.
How well, methinks, we both should live together,
If these good folks would keep within their tether!


- John Byron

Anecdote of the Jar


I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was upon the hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.


The wilderness rose up to it,
and sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.


It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.


- Wallace Stevens

Happiness


In the afternoon I watched
the she-bear; she was looking
for the secret bin of sweetness -
honey, that the bees store
in the trees’ soft caves.
Black block of gloom, she climbed down
tree after tree and shuffled on
through the woods. And then
she found it! The honey-house deep
as heartwood, and dipped into it
among the swarming bees - honey and comb
she lipped and tongued and scooped out
in her black nails, until


maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe
a little drunk, and sticky
down the rugs of her arms,
and began to hum and sway.
I saw her let go of the branches,
I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle
into the leaves, and her thick arms,
as though she would fly -
an enormous bee
all sweetness and wings -
down into the meadows, the perfections
of honeysuckle and roses and clover -
to float and sleep in the sheer nets
swaying from flower to flower
day after shining day.


- Mary Oliver

Coming Home


The war came home today,
the buddy burned to ashes,
the howling headaches in the night,
the gun beside us in the bed,
the wife and daughter turned to ghosts,
strangers turned to enemies,
the blood upon the theater seats,
children zipped in body bags,
bullets buried in the classroom walls,
plastic flowers where the garden bloomed.
I see the shrapnel of my self
shouting in the silence,
speechless at the party,
sleepless lining up the bottles
in the cabinet
on the counter
in the morning at the curb.
And I come weeping,
my only home destruction,
my only hope a stone.
Beloved come and claim me,
I’ve come home.


- William Johnson Everett

In an Old Book


In an old book—about a hundred years old—
I found, neglected among the leaves,
a watercolour with no signature.
It must have been the work of a very powerful artist.
It bore the title “Representation of Love.”


But “—of the love of extreme sensualists” would have been
more fitting.


For it was clear as you looked at this work
(the artist’s idea was easily grasped)
that the youth in this portrait wasn’t meant
for those who love in a somewhat wholesome way,
within the limits of what is strictly permitted—
with his chestnut-brown, intensely colored eyes;
with the superior beauty of his face,
the beauty of unusual allures;
with those flawless lips of his that bring
pleasure to the body that it cherishes;
with those flawless limbs of his, made for beds
called shameless by the commonplace morality.


- C.P.Cavafy
(Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn)

three pears in paris
(paring it down)


the poetry lesson


she wrote a poem about three pears
and a tangerine in paris
“it could be pared down”
they suggested
then it came down to
two pears in paris
without the tangerine
“maybe pare it down
a bit more”
they said
(yes, of course she thought)
and then the poem
came down
to just
one
pear.


here is the new pared down poem about the pear.


pear

- Patricia LeBon Herb