Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

When Giving is All We Have



One river gives

Its journey to the next.



We give because someone gave to us.

We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.

We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,

We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you

What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.


- Alberto Ríos

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?

Wait 'til I whup George Foreman's behind.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

His hand can't hit what his eyes can't see.

Now you see me, now you don't.

George thinks he will, but I know he won't.

I done wrassled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale.

Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.

I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.

- Muhammad Ali
(1942-2016)

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection


Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.


- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Halle Berry Caught in Disneyland Without Makeup

Imagine my excitement
the fire in my blood
as my greedy fingers click through to the photo,
a lead story on this end-of-August Saturday,
the trees so dry they cannot cry
for want of tears.
America,
we need more news like this!
Forget the poisoning of bees by the billions
or their connection to our own mortality.
Forget the plight of millions
living on the streets
sans food, sans work, sans medicine.
Give us more serial killers, inflated to hero size
project their likenesses on every billboard
teach their names as school yard jump rope rhymes.
Pen graphic novels around them
etch them on video game platforms around the world.
Forget the melting ice caps
rain forest decimation
the mounting molestations by pedophile priests
the commerce of women around the globe.
Serve us more Donald Trump, please
with extra vitriol spewed from blanched lips
the small American flag smirking from his lapel.
And please, keep them coming
those photos of celebrities who dared to do the unthinkable:
leave their mansions without the shield of makeup.

- Sandra Anfang

For Someone Who Did You Wrong

Though its way is to strike
In a dumb rhythm,
Stroke upon stroke,
As though the heart
Were an anvil,
The hurt you sent
Had a mind of its own.

Something in you knew
Exactly how to shape it,
To hit the target
Slipping into the heart
Through some wound-window
Left open since childhood.

While it struck outside,
It burrowed inside,
Made tunnels through
Every ground of confidence.
For days, it would lie still
Until a thought would start it.

Meanwhile, you forgot,
Went on with things
And never even knew
How that perfect
Shape of hurt
Still continued to work.

Now a new kindness
Seems to have entered time
And I can see how that hurt
Has schooled my heart
In a compassion I would
Otherwise have never learned.

Somehow now
I have begun to glimpse
The unexpected fruit
Your dark gift had planted
And I thank you
For your unknown work.

- John O’Donohue

Denouement


Sometimes
led
into discovery
scarcely informed
what perils
lie ahead
yet trusting
the way is right and clear
rich with adventure
stops in his tracks:
Wait. Wait. Is this journey

Recklessness or Fate?
Faith or Resignation?
Wisdom or Folly?

Still the pilgrim pushes on,
eyes open to unseen things
divining the path home
fears unspoken
ever forward
to survive
tempests and dashed hopes
everything hinging
on the very next living moment
to present
itself.

- Larry Kenneth Potts

Rubai One


Birds mistook Saint Francis for a tree.

May I be so free
of nervous haste, ambition, and regret
so in the extirpation of thought
innocence and improvisation
may tell the dawn each day afresh
that fresh is what it is.

The nickname of God is Now.

- Bruce Moody

I doubt that birds mistook St. Francis for a tree. I'm sure they knew exactly who he was.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Rubai One


Birds mistook Saint Francis for a tree.

May I be so free
of nervous haste, ambition, and regret
so in the extirpation of thought
innocence and improvisation
may tell the dawn each day afresh
that fresh is what it is.

The nickname of God is Now.

- Bruce Moody

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Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

- Robert Bly

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman

this is beautiful, and so universal!
When I was a kid in the '50s in a suburb of St. Louis (should write something about this),
old Miss Rossi, the kind Principal of Flynn Park School, surrounded by an almost forest-like park, took to the PA system every morning to recite for us the Flynn Park Prayer and the Flynn Park Creed. This was all before the laws preventing sectarian public school prayer, and indeed I still remember The Flynn Park Prayer, part of it at least, with great love, as it too was just totally universal! It began, "KInd, heavenly, father, Help us to receive this day as a gift from your hands, and to use it earnestly and joyously..." I could look up the rest, but I remember that part because it is MEMORABLE, and, well, I still try to do that! ♥

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman

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(graphics by wacco Ronaldo :tiphat:)

Counting on Sunday

He didn't have his
Heart in his sermon.
If he did, it didn't Show up in any enthusiasm
In his voice.
And I didn't have
My restless soul
In church.
If I did, I wouldn't Have counted
The 823 bricks
On the wall.
Outside one Of the48
Window panes
Behind the 16
White shutters
That helped shade
The sunlight
Off the 11 crosses,
2brass, 4 on cloth,
1 on a plaque that's nailed
To the rail that leads
To the wooden one
That's carved on the altar
Just left of the
Wooden one that holds
The page numbers
That face
The one in concrete On the baptismal font
That stands beside
The organist
Who is married To the preacher who
Has a silver one
Hanging around his neck
As he speaks to
10 women, 8 men
And 4 children
Who sit in 21pews
That hold 161 Hymn books
Under 78 electric candles
That shine on
5 doorknobs
And 2 flags That stand
Over 11 eyeglasses,
7 necklaces,
2 flower arrangements,
1 hair bow,
1 bow tie,
1 silver barrette,
And a sermon
In a pear tree.

- Margaret Vaughn
( poet laureate of Tennessee)

Yeah, I've sat through some boring sermons; used to count the pieces of glass in the stained glass windows.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Counting on Sunday

He didn't have his
Heart in his sermon....

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Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now--whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they just stand there looking the way they look
when we're looking; surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade--surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptyness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

- Mary Oliver

It fell to me


It fell to me.
I don’t know why.
How can we know these things?
It fell to me to dismantle,
to take down the fortifications,
to take apart myself
not so to destroy
but to try to understand,
to hope to know
the inner workings
of a single human heart
and go from there—
to Auschwitz,
for example,
as an end point
of all that brought us there
or as a new beginning for me,
my own very private mirror
that shows a heart quite able
to morph such an image
of unspeakable acts
reflected there
never, never to be done again
into others of their kind
that go unnoticed, unseen,
unrecognized as such
until their carnage has been done
and then we say once more,
“Never again! Never again!”,
to ourselves and go on—
to drones over Pakistan
for example, run by little boys
with joy sticks and video cams
from half a universe away
and think, no doubt,
if they think at all
of what they do,
of what we ask them to do
in our name and with our money,
think, no doubt, that they are fighting evil.
“A silly comparison,” you say,
“Auschwitz and drones.
What have you learned
in all your dismantling
if this is where you end—
with drones and joy sticks?”
And where would you suggest I look, dear listener,
that I might understand more clearly
what I am complicit in—
Orlando, perhaps?
Where, dear listener, would you look?
Where would you look?

- Bill Denham

Inclination

One's throat must be like a garden
And one's eyes like windows
through which love passes;
And one's stature
Must be like a tree
that rises out of rocks;
And poetry must be like a singing bird,
Perching on the highest branch of a tree,
Breaking the heavy silence of the world.

- Hamid Reza Rahimi

:heart: OH, YEAH! :heart:

A bit of color and Paul Klee's birds.

No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
- John Donne

Pulse Night Club Orlando, FL 6/12/16, 1:49 am

I am Xavier, I am Juan, I am Enrique
You are Amanda, Frankie and Angel
We are Mercedes, Christopher and Luis
We are 6 degrees of separation
Which means there is no separation

If I could have been there at 1:49 am
I would have taken each person by the hand
Led them outside said, Look at those stars
Go home now - be safe

If I could have been there at 12:49 am
I would have kept Omar Mateen
From entering
Instead I’d take his hand
Say go home, go home
To your heart
Go home to your humanity
There you can find safety
There you will find you are not separate

I would, if I could, turn his hate into tears
I would say the distance between
Your dreams and my longing is
The distance between
Each heartbeat
I would say that we are all us
There is no you and them
Only the disconnections
of you/them in your own heart

It’s the truth that hurts the most
If I had been there at 1:49 am
I could not have done a thing

Nor could God
God gave us choice and will
We choose what we will
God says choose life
Choose life

This night
God cries with us
And asks us to remember
They are us

Choose love
Choose life

- Sally Churgel

For All The Fathers

For all the fathers with us and gone,
the ones who worked in factories
and taught us to drive cars,
the ones who knew how to put a worm on a hook
and how to get a fish, flopping, off of it.

For all the fathers, lonely on their couches,
ash trays on their bellies, the smell
of cigarettes on their hands, the blare
of the television drowning out the voices
of those too difficult to remember,
even some of those still living and breathing
in the same room.

For all the fathers reaching for their books
turning to the pages of poetry that give music
to the sounds trapped inside them, turning
the pages of manuals that informed their hands
on how to make furniture for the family, toys
for the grandchildren, cradles for the neighbor’s children
adopted from Vietnam.

For all the fathers who once, when boys, looked up
to see their own fathers standing in the place
of the men who came before them, men
who loved a good story, a certain spring flower,
the smell of dust rising after a rain.

For all the fathers who could not give
what was expected of them
and showed this by their absence, gone
in a bottle, gone on a rampage, gone
on an assignment. Gone. Gone. Gone.

For all the fathers who lifted and carried groceries
over water, babies up mountains, children off to bed,
war stories untold for decades, and memories from childhood
they could not speak of even to the ones they loved.

For all the fathers in good health and ill, for their strength
and their weariness, the dwindling away of possibility
into the wrinkles and bald spots we remember
before the final good-byes. For all the fathers,
the silent, the speaking, and the fathers
all of their young boys will become.

- Ann Arbor

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.


- Wendell Berry

A Cautionary Tale

I woke from a dream
of a circle of men where
the most basic elements of men's work
had been forgotten
where the distrust and fear anger
in men was not met with
wisdom where being here to make a racket had primacy
where we forgot to ask if we
could agree that there would be no violence
no physical violence this week
where we were reluctant to share
even our names and praise with
men we did not know
laughter and poetry singing were
thrown out, just get 'em out of here
someone said, "just punch him
in the face. I'll pay your
legal bills." it was a dark time
it was hell.

- Mark Gardiner

You Cannot Kill Me

I am not only I
but a multiplicity of souls
I have always been here
I will always be back
I was your uncle, your 5th grade teacher, your cousin
I will be your grandson, your niece, the boy next door
you can erase my words
and a new Sappho, Rumi, Whitman, Stein, Lorca, Lorde
will emerge and write what I wrote
even more beautifully
you can shatter my statues
and a new Michelangelo
with a sharper chisel and a stronger arm
will make grander statues
you can silence my singing
and a new Bessie Smith
will sound a bluer note
I have always been here
indivisible, essential
to the human spirit
firebird I am
feathered serpent
in every opposition
I am
the tender collapse
that always happens
before a song
rises up
to heaven
you see
I cannot die
you cannot
kill me


- Franklin Abbott

Campo dei FioriRelated Poem Content Details

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's word.

- Czeslaw Milosz
Warsaw, 1943
(Translation by Louis Iribarne)

My Dad As A Young Man
c. 1930

His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
He never forgot the thump of the woman landing on the hood

at the corner where he couldn't slow down to turn, she
stepped in front of the grill, the hood ornament a terrible witness.

Over the decades, he said things like, Mary, I couldn't stop.
or I saw a woman crossing the street. Never the story

beginning middle end. Either he told me she died or I just knew it.
I played my own scene of what might have happened.

His heart stopped or beat wildly or maybe both. Brain said
no, No, NO. He opened the car door, got out, stood upright.

Bright blood on packed white snow. Felt hat flung far
from her body. Fur-topped boots without her feet in them.

Screams of her friend sounded far away. And other cars,
cars with equipment that worked, brakes that worked, stopped.

All the drivers looked like his father, the robust real estate man
glaring through windshields at the son who read aloud from books.

Little details before he could look at her. A woman he'd never know,
couldn't recognize but who would spend the rest of his life with him.

- Mary L. Barnard

A Map to the Next World
for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged
from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It
must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the
altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our
children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born
there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to
disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to
them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-
ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s
small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a
spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking
from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh
deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world
there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song
she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you
will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they
entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the
destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our
tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

- Joy Harjo

For my nightmare, it would be a bicyclist on one of our narrow winding back roads wearing dark clothing and invisible in the shade of overgrown trees. Although I am sure this poem is about responsibility in keeping equipment safe, there is also responsibility on the part of the victim as well.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

My Dad As A Young Man
c. 1930

His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
...

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