Oceans


I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.


And nothing
happens!

A special birthday blessing for Barry Chertov:


A Beauty Blessing


As stillness in stone to silence is wed
May your heart be somewhere a God might dwell.

Solstice 2020


Two days before Solstice 2020
But the light is already lengthening.


We humans cannot measure the complexity of the
trigonometry, mystery, poetry of
axis angles, rotation...

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.


Then the...

Eleven Unthinking Seconds


(Inspired by the Social Dilemma documentary)


Casually scrolling through my social media feed,
an ad catches my interest; Magnetic eyelashes.

Orion says rest
oh mystery of the larynx
align forces that
speech ring true from heart to heart
transforming relationships


gather birch bark ash
mix with dried red rose petals
sprinkle...

Rosa, Born During a Pandemic


On Zoom an infant smiles:
It was months before we visited you live and three weeks
more before we could hold you. My granddaughter limitless,
without...

Excerpt from Little Gidding


We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the...

Declaration of Interdependence
Such has been the patient sufferance…
We’re a mother’s bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We’re her three children pleading for bubble gum and their...

The Vote



My eyes wing out over misted fields
Dappled with islands of snow geese and sandhill cranes
I’m in my car making calls
To Hispanics in Arizona: “Your vote counts!”
This is our...

Twilight in Hendy Woods


This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.


This is the hour of magic

The Place Where We Are Right


From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.


The place where we are right
is hard and trampled

Vanishing
The grief and sense of loss we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. -...

Four Quartets: The East Coker


III


O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of...

We Have Lost So Much


We have lost so much
says my friend, Patty
as she carefully holds
a little bird stunned, fallen to
the base of the sky scraper
it’s just collided.

Psalm


Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand sifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble...

More Than Something Else


Something Else.
Some one else
Some where else


That place is here,
In my home,

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my...

Turkeys





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Sometimes we saw shadows of gods
in the trees; silenced, we went on.
Sometimes the dog would bound off

Another Shovel


On this Covid-of-Thanksgivings
As the year draws down
Bleakness penetrates our masked faces
A shroud of our former selves

Our village weave has unraveled and
Our...

Miracles


Here I sit at my computer on 11-11-11, reading hours of emails and petitions and forwards about Delaware River fracking, and Mississippi’s rejection of personhood for women’s eggs, and...

Gratitude


Gratitude, I am your listening post,
perched on the shoulders of mountains,
in the grasses, in your granite face,



reclining in the long valleys of your body.

Fire Recovery Heart Sutra

My house is nothing more than emptiness,
emptiness is nothing more than my house.
Home is exactly empty,
and emptiness is exactly home.

My house is empty: ...

Arms Full


Gratitude means showing up on life’s doorstep,
love’s threshold, dressed in a clown suit,
rubber-nosed, gunboat shoes flapping.
Gratitude shows up with arms full of wildflowers,...

To a Passer-By on Thanksgiving Day


Gentle Reader,
it is good that you have paused
along your way, accepting
the silent invitation of these lines


For it was you I had in mind

Grace


Thanks and blessing be
to the Sun and the Earth
for this bread and this wine,----
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
---------------this food;
thanks be and blessing to them
who...

Gratitude Goulash


Take down your biggest pot,
bigger than you think you need


Slice, dice or cut into manageable pieces
memories of unbounded joy
and the desiccated remains

Contemplating the Sioux Treaty of 1868 at Thanksgiving 2016
for the Standing Rock Sioux and allies protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline set to run through their tribal lands


Countrymen, we...

Journey Poem III
Our whole life is a search party for home,
even if someone still greets us with open arms,
even if someone broke our spirit there,
even if it was gutted and now it’s a parking...

You God


You God, who plows my face in furrowed lines
Who lets me tap my foot in time
Who skipped the world in wild delight
Before first blackbird throated his height
Come play again and...

We All Want Something Different


In the space between
civilization and chaos
what form is your fear
going to take?


Pay attention my friend

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo152x23.gif
Opinion
When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure...

In A True Democracy


If forests of trees
smelling smoke from distant fires,
could cast their vote for rain,
We’d have a downpour.


If flocks of birds,

Legends of Ordinary Wisdom




When he is eighty-eight
The poet
bent like the trunk of
a weathered oak
shuffles to the lip of the pond

November for Beginners


Snow would be the easy

way out—that softening

sky like a sigh of relief

at finally being allowed

The Cave


Someone standing at the mouth had
the idea to enter. To go further


than light or language could
go. As they followed
the idea, light and language followed

In The Book

A hand appears.
It writes on the wall.
Just a hand moving in the air,
and writing on the wall.

A voice comes and says the words,
"You have been weighed,
you have been judged,

Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle


Try to love everything that gets in your way;
The Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin and doing leg exercises in...

All for You, Honored Ones


The teacher Dongshan was washing his bowl by the river and saw two crows fighting over a frog and tearing it apart. The student asked, “Why does it always have to be...

Rain In The Time Of Plague


I


Its curtain falls gentle as a quarantine from God
that keeps souls tidied from rain and one another’s faces.

Yielding


When I inquire
about prayer and opening
to the Great Mystery,
the I Ching responds with
“Field/Yielding” and
the Mother Goddess,
the Dark Animal Mother.

Time to take a breath


Now is a time of deep relief,
of grief for the brokenness of things—
certainly, no time for gloating
nor for complacency.


We have work to do,

Passing Through


I borrow this dust
from a lonely planet—
the earth rotting and dry,
scaffolding sent to the heavens,
wanting more.

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,

For Nothing Is Fixed




For nothing is fixed,

forever, forever, forever,

it is not fixed;

Crossroads


My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young...

When Fannie Lou Hamer Said


I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired


She meant
No more turned cheek
No more patience for the...

One Vote


After reading a letter from his mother, Harry T. Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution

My parents are from countries
where...

I Voted




I voted today.


I dropped my heart into the ballot box
And cast my vote for the world I want to see.

How Does It Happen? <o:p></o:p>
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It happens at the borders <o:p></o:p>
when grim men answer <o:p></o:p>
all questions with a flag <o:p></o:p>
and dismiss talk of civil...