PLEASE DISTURB

I hung out my “please disturb sign”
but nobody did

It would have been fine with me

Nobody reads anymore
it’s all this television

:birthday:

Happy Birthday, Larry!

On behalf of all of Waccodom, thank you so much for sharing poetry with us!
It brightens my day and many others! :waccosun:
...

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Black Holes Exist

The astrophysicists proclaim
Black Holes Exist.
I believe them.
Yes, within my mind I see them
Black against the Black of space.
But now I ask
What are they?
Are they...

What then Hafez?

Hafez said:
“THE GREAT RELIGIONS ARE THE SHIPS AND POETRY THE LIFE BOATS
EVERY SANE MAN I’VE EVER KNOWN HAS JUMPED OVERBOARD.”

But you may ask: what then Hafez?

Then...

Listening


Lately
I have been listening to trees.

I asked them
if they have been talking to me
all along.

The Answer

Then what is the answer? - Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their
tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence...

Brought to Tears

I weep in the middle of a story more often
than in the midst of real life events.
In story the meaning is so compressed.
Whole lives crowd into a few pages.
The bible is an...

Traveling At Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can...

Being a Lake

He has never dreamed of being a lake
in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
Surely there could be no better, in the way
of dreamy aspirations: to be clear and cold
and...

After the War

For Joseph Flum

When he got to the farmhouse, he rifled through
the cabinets, drawers, and cupboards,
and his buddies did too. The place was abandoned,
or so he thought, and...

They carved “Nigger Lover”
On the hood of our car
After Dad came back from Selma
He went because he said he had to
Just like he’d done in ’44
To him it was the same war
Fought in a different...

this amazing day

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is...

We Need Each Other Now

We need each other now.https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-07-11_09-49-41.png
In truth, we always have.
But as things disintegrate,
as chaos and...

Clearing

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there

I love this one! I first heard it in 1968, recited by a man who called himself "The Great Lorenzo" and went around the country in a van with his female partner, reciting great poems by heart in...

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up https://trythisroad.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/ferlinghetti.jpg
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am...

"next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn's early my

country 'tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we...

1925 Jeffers published this--before the Depression, before Joseph McCarthy, before the Vietnam War, before 1968, before Nixon, before shock and awe! I would like to take some sadly smiling comfort in...

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun's birth at...

Susanna


Nobody in the hospital
Could tell the age
Of the old woman who
Was called Susanna
I knew she spoke some English
And that she was an immigrant
Out of a little country

Swimming Lessons

A mile across the lake, the horizon bare
or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches.
No sand. No voices calling me back.
Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair
push...

I'm not sure it is silent. Many are still haunted by those experiences. Who can measure the damage done to so many? :heart: My nephew, working in underwater demolitions was personally traumatized...

What Were They Like?

Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and...

Meditations At Lagunitas


All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general...

Mennonites

We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to...

First Light


From way down deep some dog is howling,

to the moon, to his mate, to his misery

From way down deep in my dream I hear him

and when I open my eyes I hear him

Beautiful images. Thank you!

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires...

A Healing contract


When chaos erupts
May sanity prevail in our nation
Keep asking; what do you dearly love?

When chaos erupts
may we depend on Beauty
and remember the healing contract

Snake

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-06-15_12-20-02.pngA snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep,...

The Mother

You thought that you
would be treated like a person.

You thought that you would
be classed
as a human being.
someone with needs
and feelings.

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is...

The Dying Poet’s Address to Young People

You young people of times to come
And of new dawns over cities which
Have yet to be built, also you
Who are still unborn, listen
To my voice, the...

Paradigm Shift
Millions of spiritual creatures
walk the earth

...

Nocturne

Because these are not the nights of empty hands,
because these are not the nights of dreams galloping
like gasoline fire over blue tar,
I wish you could see what I see
when I look...

I am touched by this memory poem.Today, Memorial Day, I think of my father who wasn't just called to service, to kill Germans and Japanese humans, and without question... it was more of a huge...

Lost in the Mail

Madeleine Bell, at 2240
in her wavy print dress
hobbled up to the mailbox and
inspected each piece:
another sympathy card
for her run over dog,
this from her bridge...

A World in Pain

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere

How Fascism Will Come

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
- attributed to Sinclair Lewis


39646When fascism comes, it will greet us with a...

39632

Senior Discount

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.

So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

I’ll wait at register two in my green...

Here with Sonoma County earth.
39591

Quit eating all that heavy food before bed.

A Song on the End of the World


On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are...

I think I remember (that's the way the elderly talk) that Lew Welch told people that, when he died, he'd be buried in a place on Mt. Tamalpais that no one would ever be able to find. He left a...

"Right now we need . . . truth sayers"!
Thank you for introducing me to this performance poet new to me.

The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing....

My Kumbaya Moment

The sky one-dimensional, flat
Shades on white and gray.
The sun a blur, burning
A hole in the smeared sky.

I had coffee with God this morning.
I know it's not...

For The Children


The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up
up, as we all
go down.