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  1. TopTop #4111
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Name:  Jewish-Cemetery.jpg
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    My background photo of Segal's holocaust memorial sculpture adjacent to Legion of Honor, SF.
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  3. TopTop #4112
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    self astronomy


    a theory about emotions
    they are like telescopes
    you see yourself in one
    everything is enormous


    but if you turn it around
    to find how others see you
    a distant miniature
    too faint to really discern


    - Kevin Pryne
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  5. TopTop #4113
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Background Image by Lorna Simpson – "Deep Blue"

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  7. TopTop #4114
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    After

    after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
    after boarding up all the windows and doors;

    after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
    after building my house on the rock of no,
    inaccessible to flattery and fear;

    after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
    after hurling handfuls of silence
    and monosyllable of scorn at my loves;

    after forgetting my name;
    and the name of my birthplace;
    and the name of my race;

    after judging and sentencing myself
    to perpetual waiting,
    and perpetual loneliness, I heard
    against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms,

    the humid, tender, insistent
    onset of spring.


    - Octavio Paz
    (translated by Robert Bly)
    Last edited by Barry; 04-05-2019 at 01:35 PM.
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  9. TopTop #4115
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In The Caves of Swimmers

    In the Gilf Kebir plateau in the Sahara side
    of Egypt there is a cave containing rock paintings
    of swimming figures. Did these figures represent
    escaping an Ice Age climate change, a desert
    drought, or a Paleolithic form of buoyancy found in
    dreams? It's possible they were learning a way
    of moving inside their lives amid the waters of
    uncertainty. There is a sense that they are
    practicing a devotional shape of their own dream
    of life; it could be that they are swimming towards
    God.

    In the caves of our own current lives, whether
    floating or drowning in a troubled ocean, aren't we
    pulled by a magnet in the same divine direction?
    From our own beds at night we may float the storm,
    dive into an astral star wave, not to flee but answer
    a distant beckoning. It has been called levitation, this
    rising in a luminous night spell like the gesture of prayer
    in a swimmer's breath that reaches for the shore.
    It's been called astral projection, rising, lighter than bones,
    above our bedroom walls, beyond ceilings of moons and
    paths of stars like an ageless body swimming through
    centuries of sleep.

    - Rich Meyers
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  11. TopTop #4116
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Atavism


    1
    Sometimes in the open you look up
    where birds go by, or just nothing,
    and wait. A dim feeling comes
    you were like this once, there was air,
    and quiet; it was by a lake, or
    maybe a river you were alert
    as an otter and were suddenly born
    like the evening star into wide
    still worlds like this one you have found
    again, for a moment, in the open.


    2
    Something is being told in the woods: aisles of
    shadow lead away; a branch waves;
    a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
    path. A withheld presence almost
    speaks, but then retreats, rustles
    a patch of brush. You can feel
    the centuries ripple generations
    of wandering, discovering, being lost
    and found, eating, dying, being born.
    A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
    the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
    down a forest aisle is a strange, long
    plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
    For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
    wider than your mind, away out over everything.

    - William Stafford
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  13. TopTop #4117
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight

    I found myself
    suddenly voluminous,
    three-dimensioned,
    a many-roofed building in moonlight.

    Thought traversed
    me as simply as moths might.
    Feelings traversed me as fish.

    I heard myself thinking,
    It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

    Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
    the usual footsteps above me.

    Washed my face again with hot water,
    as I did when I was a child.

    - Jane Hirshfield
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  15. TopTop #4118
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Betrothed

    You hear yourself walking on the snow.
    You hear the absence of the birds.
    A stillness so complete, you hear
    the whispering inside of you. Alone
    morning after morning, and even more
    at night. They say we are born alone,
    to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
    We get to be alone by time, by luck,
    or by misadventure. When I hit the log
    frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
    it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
    which goes pure all through the valley,
    like a crow calling unexpectedly
    at the darker end of twilight that awakens
    me in the middle of a life. The black
    and white of me mated with this indifferent
    winter landscape. I think of the moon
    coming in a little while to find the white
    among these colorless pines.

    - Jack Gilbert
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  16. TopTop #4119
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    the total thrust is global justice


    The total thrust is
    global justice
    so we gotta fix the politics
    and put a check upon its economics
    or before you know it, a warrior-poet
    may try to upend the
    corporate agenda that's
    got 'em blind to the real bottom line.
    It's intense when you sense the only interests
    on the docket
    are fat cats with Republi-Crats
    in their pocket.
    It's crooked now
    just look at how
    the pundits are funded.
    They're devious at CBS and, yes,
    they'll choose the news that fits the script unless
    I play tricks on the matrix.
    (In case you can't guess shit,
    I'm not to be messed with.)
    The folks know my art form
    comes straight from the heart for 'em.
    A lyrical storm that departs from the norm
    and transforms as I'm giving
    rhymes for the minds in the times that we live in.
    I can't hang with the anguish
    and I don't want my language to languish
    'cause there ain't nothing like Drew's
    hip hop haikus
    I got a mandate
    to disturb
    the urban landscape.

    We got tyrannies
    right here in these
    States,
    and you never know
    when they'll go
    right back to some tactics
    like COINTELPRO.
    If we could see through the lies
    see how they brutalize
    and get cops
    to beat speech in the streets
    and guard sweatshops.
    I'm ending these industries.
    Please can we factor the
    effect of the
    trajectory?
    This whole place is racist
    and sexist from North
    Dakota down to Texas
    with the twenty-first century's
    youth in penitentiaries
    and the night never seemed this dark
    but now half of the stars
    are behind prison bars.
    Oh say can you see?
    But if we can dream a new day it may be.
    You had to know the baddest bro
    with the phattest flow would shake up the status quo
    with my adjectives and adverbs and ad libs.
    Like Gandhi
    protest is my modus operandi.
    It's like Malcolm and Martin's
    evolution with art
    and revolution
    'cause the total thrust is
    global justice.


    - Drew Dellinger
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  18. TopTop #4120
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In this World


    The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
    tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
    are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
    dark floodwater moves down the river.
    The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
    I have climbed up to water the horses
    and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
    letting the day gather and pass. Below me
    cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
    slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
    men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
    spending their lives, in order to kill each other.


    - Wendell Berry
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  20. TopTop #4121
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Place

    On the last day of the world
    I would want to plant a tree

    what for
    not the fruit

    the tree that bears the fruit
    is not the one that was planted

    I want the tree that stands
    in the earth for the first time

    with the sun already
    going down

    and the water
    touching its roots

    in the earth full of the dead
    and the clouds passing

    one by one
    over its leaves

    - W.S. Merwin
    Last edited by Barry; 04-14-2019 at 09:56 AM.
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  22. TopTop #4122
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Variation on a Theme


    Thank you my life long afternoon
    late in this spring that has no age
    my window above the river
    for the woman you led me to
    when it was time at last the words
    coming to me out of mid-air
    that carried me through the clear day
    and come even now to find me
    for old friends and echoes of them
    those mistakes only I could make
    homesickness that guides the plovers
    from somewhere they had loved before
    they knew they loved it to somewhere
    they had loved before they saw it
    thank you good body hand and eye
    and the places and moments known
    only to me revisiting
    once more complete just as they are
    and the morning stars I have seen
    and the dogs who are guiding me


    - W.S. Merwin
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  24. TopTop #4123
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Poem Liturgy

    There is an energy
    That insists its way into words.

    Mary Oliver knew about it
    And so hid pencils in trees
    Where she walked daily in the woods.
    The mystery of that energy
    might come, she knew
    with its inescapable calling card,
    and in the breeze of morning
    send her to her knees

    There close enough to earth and
    under the daily office of sky

    she could find what she needed to worship.

    - Judith Stone
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  26. TopTop #4124
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Paris

    J'ai vu Paris dans l'ombre
    Hypogée où l'on riait trop
    Paris une grande améthyste
    Ces soldats belges en troupe
    Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette
    Après le pot-au-lait
    L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits
    J'ai entendu la berloque
    Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité
    Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann
    Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis
    Les peintres travaillaient
    Mon cœur t'adore

    - Guillaume Apollinaire
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  28. TopTop #4125
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Excesses of God

    Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
    Our God? For to be equal a need
    Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
    Rainbows over the rain
    And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
    On the domes of deep sea-shells,
    And make the necessary embrace of breeding
    Beautiful also as fire,
    Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
    Nor the birds without music:
    There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
    The extravagant kindness, the fountain
    Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
    If power and desire were perch-mates.

    - Robinson Jeffers
    Last edited by Barry; 04-18-2019 at 12:10 PM.
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  30. TopTop #4126
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I asked my friend Tom Bissinger to translate the poem, Paris. Tom's been to Paris, once as an extra in the 1969 film: "If It'sTuesday, This Must Be Belgium" with Suzanne Pleshette'.

    • Paris
    • J'ai vu Paris dans l’ombre. I’ve seen shadowy Paris
    • Hypogée où l'on riait trop A subterranean chamber where one laughed too much
    • Paris une grande améthyste Paris a gleaming amethyst
    • Ces soldats belges en troupe like a troop of Belgian soldiers
    • Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette old dames dressed in Perrette
    • Après le pot-au-lait. after their lattes (chocolate dessert, yogurt?)
    • L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits The flight captain retells his exploits
    • J'ai entendu la berloque. I understood the berloque (?)
    • Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité but that grin of those who had deferred that boundless summons
    • Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann Shakespeare’s shadow on the Boulevard Haussmann
    • Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis the ugly polite dress of men who are still here
    • Les peintres travaillaient Painters work/ paint
    • Mon cœur t’adore. My heart (pun on dog) worships you
    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Paris

    J'ai vu Paris dans l'ombre
    Hypogée où l'on riait trop
    Paris une grande améthyste
    Ces soldats belges en troupe
    Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette
    Après le pot-au-lait
    L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits
    J'ai entendu la berloque
    Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité
    Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann
    Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis
    Les peintres travaillaient
    Mon cœur t'adore

    - Guillaume Apollinaire
    Attached Thumbnails (click thumbnail for larger view) Attached Thumbnails (click thumbnail for larger view) Expand  
    Last edited by Barry; 04-18-2019 at 12:12 PM.
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  32. TopTop #4127
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The stations of the cross

    The stations of the cross are set—
    so, too, the visions
    of those few parishioners
    who come to worship
    this Good Friday evening.
    Three thunder-loud percussive shocks—
    the scepter strikes the floor
    and space cracks open
    that here and now, all these centuries gone,
    his words might still be felt and heard.
    His simple words, then, illumined by a scripture passage
    and a silent meditation, framed by clear bell tones.
    There follows an offering of other words, mystic ones,
    this time turned visual by a dancer’s supple body’s moves,
    a second time of silence, then,
    a longer time of sharing,
    and simple singing,
    together, as one by one,
    in single file, this row of souls
    makes its reverent way
    from this station
    of the cross
    to the next
    until their
    ritual is
    done—
    until it
    is finished.

    It was the time of sharing,
    that made the worship real:
    dour and dark one voice,
    rainbow light and wistful another
    a fear of death in each
    spoken, embraced or left unsaid,
    measured and melodious, another
    even in futile effort to bare a wound
    that could not be born
    before these few
    nor before the cross itself,
    thoughtful, redolent of real hope
    this other worshiper’s words—
    hope found for him in the personhood of god.
    Jewels, all, these spoken words, before the cross
    and smiles and laughter too were there
    and memories brought back from childhood
    and from Latin liturgy sung—
    and there it ended in beauty
    with an offering—unsought, unplanned—
    a gift of grace—a single voice,
    singing, in love, the Latin tongue—
    Gregorian in its feel and subtle melody—
    singing the beauty of the tree,
    the beauty of that very tree
    from which the cross of Christ had come,
    that once living tree, now felled and dead,
    that bore, this night, those centuries gone,
    his dying body.


    - Bill Denham

    Last edited by Barry; 04-18-2019 at 10:22 PM.
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  34. TopTop #4128
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Exodus: The Never
    Ending Story

    Exodus
    from America
    is a phrase that one
    is beginning to hear more
    and more during these days.

    The E word
    sits in our DNA.
    Yes, we’ll celebrate
    the great escape from Egypt
    but it’s never what is seems in the
    land of those Mitzraims: Canaan, Rome, and
    Spain, tragic illusions and heart-breaking dreams.

    Yes, we’ll
    celebrate spring and
    renewal, the miracle of
    creation, but along the tracks
    of our pilgrimage we have had our
    original tickets punched merely as travel
    visas, affirming the truth that all beings on this
    earth are undocumented immigrants walking hand

    in hand
    through the
    the Sinai sand,
    across the Edmond Pettis
    Bridge and the parched desert
    darkness toward the Rio Grand.
    The hands that penned the Torah did not
    begin with the creation or the fall but clearly
    proclaimed the duty for us all to heed the next call
    when the next Pharaoh starts to build the next wall.



    * Mitzrayim: the Hebrew word for ancient Egypt/the ‘narrow
    place” both in geography and the human heart.


    - Bruce Silverman
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  36. TopTop #4129
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Seven Stanzas at Easter

    Make no mistake: if He rose at all
    it was as His body;
    if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
    the amino acids rekindle,
    the Church will fall.

    It was not as the flowers,
    each soft spring recurrent;
    it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
    eleven apostles;
    it was as His flesh: ours.

    The same hinged thumbs and toes,
    the same valved heart
    that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
    out of enduring Might
    new strength to enclose.

    Let us not mock God with metaphor,
    analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
    making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
    credulity of earlier ages:
    let us walk through the door.

    The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
    not a stone in a story,
    but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
    time will eclipse for each of us
    the wide light of day.

    And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
    make it a real angel,
    weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
    the dawn light, robed in real linen
    spun on a definite loom.

    Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
    for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
    lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
    by the miracle,
    and crushed by remonstrance.

    - John Updike
    Last edited by Barry; 04-20-2019 at 10:52 PM.
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  38. TopTop #4130
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Tomorrow

    Tomorrow
    we are
    bones and ash,
    the roots of weeks
    poking through
    our skulls.


    Today,
    simple clothes,
    empty mind,
    full stomach,
    alive, aware,
    right here,
    right now.


    Drunk on music,
    who needs wine?


    Come on,
    sweetheart,
    let’s go dancing
    while we’ve
    still got feet.


    - David Budbill
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  40. TopTop #4131
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson


    A Piece of the Storm
    for Sharon Horvath

    From the shadow of domes

    in the city of domes,
    A snowflake, a blizzard of one,

    weightless, entered your room
    And made its way to the arm of the chair

    where you, looking up
    From your book, saw it the moment it landed.

    That’s all
    There was to it.

    No more than a solemn waking
    To brevity, to the lifting and falling

    away of attention, swiftly,
    A time between times,

    a flowerless funeral.
    No more than that
    Except for the feeling

    that this piece of the storm,
    Which turned into nothing

    before your eyes, would come back,
    That someone years hence,

    sitting as you are now, might say:
    “It’s time. The air is ready.

    The sky has an opening.”

    - Mark Strand




    "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."
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  41. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  42. TopTop #4132
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Ode to This Small Joy

    Someone discovered
    the giraffe hums
    at a harmonic rate
    of 92 Hertz,
    voice thrumming
    the tower of spine
    and trachea once
    thought to be silent,
    and her humming is
    like monks chanting
    holy and ascetic,
    the vibrations rolling
    up the vertebrae
    gentle and slow,
    a long-lashed
    face lifting
    from water to sky,
    taut dark sides
    veined with light
    ready to crack
    open the body.

    - Maria Calabretta Cancio-Bello
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  44. TopTop #4133
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    vi

    At the council of animals
    our people are on trial
    we are inconvenienced, angry—
    they struggle pathetically with disease

    the long list of extinct species is noted

    an envoy from the ants arrives
    and speaks of the time we,
    or one of us, chose in drowsy
    compassion to save an ant’s life

    our case is referred to the plants

    trees are emotion itself—so fully open
    to the elements that they do not move, save
    in the wind—always sumptuous, always
    digging for more strength, more knowledge

    yet they pause to ask us
    Do you know were you come from?

    What you walk on? Whither you go?

    - Lee Perron
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  46. TopTop #4134
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Now is the Time

    Don’t let the jewels remain buried
    at the bottom of the ocean

    Dive deep
    Hold your breath
    Let another breath breathe you

    Let the breath of the universe
    propel you ever deeper
    into the mystery of Being

    Surrendering to the unknown
    as it unfolds in your life

    Moment by moment
    Miracle by miracle

    What jewels will you bring
    to the surface to share with the world?

    What gold did you find hidden
    in the depths of the darkness?

    Wear it as a crown,
    a symbol of the wisdom
    and power discovered
    in the depths of your Being

    Let the voice of love
    find its expression
    through your heart
    broken or unbroken

    No need to wait for perfection
    to let your light shine
    You’re already reflecting
    the perfect light

    Let the heart of compassion
    flow as a river of mercy
    into the wounds of humanity

    Now is the time
    Now is the time
    Now is the time

    - Kathleen Rose McTeigue
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  48. TopTop #4135
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Music


    When I was a child
    I once sat sobbing on the floor
    Beside my mother’s piano
    As she played and sang
    For there was in her singing
    A shy yet solemn glory
    My smallness could not hold
    And when I was asked
    Why I was crying
    I had no words for it
    I only shook my head
    And went on crying
    Why is it that music
    At its most beautiful
    Opens a wound in us
    An ache a desolation
    Deep as a homesickness
    For some far-off
    And half-forgotten country
    I’ve never understood
    Why this is so
    But there’s an ancient legend
    From the other side of the world
    That gives away the secret
    Of this mysterious sorrow
    For centuries on centuries
    We have been wandering
    But we were made for Paradise
    As deer for the forest
    And when music comes to us
    With its heavenly beauty
    It brings us desolation
    For when we hear it
    We half remember
    That lost native country
    We dimly remember the fields
    Their fragrant windswept clover
    The birdsongs in the orchards
    The wild white violets in the moss
    By the transparent streams
    And shining at the heart of it
    Is the longed-for beauty
    Of the One who waits for us
    Who will always wait for us
    In those radiant meadows
    Yet also came to live with us
    And wanders where we wander.


    - Anne Porter

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  49. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  50. TopTop #4136
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Under a Wild Green Fig Tree

    I am going to eat seven pomegranate seeds
    and lie down under a wild green fig tree
    in a field that has been ploughed three times

    because I want to sleep in fertile soil
    sinking into dream time, dream space,
    and slip past the door to the underworld,

    which has been left ajar for questers
    and adepts, for reckless night revelers
    stumbling into the corridor of ghosts,

    so I can wander the subterranean realm
    and listen to Persephone’s hell songs,
    music she could learn only in Hades—

    the low, fateful lyrics of death,
    the soul’s radical return to innocence,
    the earth’s eternal movement and passage,

    our deep human labor to become spirits,
    our almost vegetal need to be reborn,
    the cycle of loss, myth of regeneration.

    - Edward Hirsch
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  52. TopTop #4137
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Not wild, but growing in the back yard.

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    Under a Wild Green Fig Tree
    ...
    Last edited by Barry; 04-28-2019 at 11:34 AM.
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  53. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  54. TopTop #4138
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Candles in Babylon

    Through the midnight streets of Babylon
    between the steel towers of their arsenals,
    between the torture castles with no windows,
    we race by barefoot, holding tight
    our candles, trying to shield
    the shivering flames, crying
    "Sleepers Awake!"
    hoping
    the rhyme's promise was true,
    that we may return
    from this place of terror
    home to a calm dawn and
    the work we had just begun.

    - Denise Levertov
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  55. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  56. TopTop #4139
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

    It should be the most desired sight of all
    the person with whom you hope to live and die

    walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
    Should be yet I say there is something

    more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
    so out from us there’s no vocabulary

    but mathematics and optics
    equations letting sight pierce through time

    into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
    exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous

    —beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
    beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

    or life, rage
    for order, rage for destruction

    beyond this love which stirs
    the air every time she walks into the room

    These impersonae, however we call them
    won’t invade us as on movie screens

    they are so old, so new, we are not to them
    we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

    of our tilted gazing
    but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

    - Adrienne Rich
    Last edited by Barry; 04-29-2019 at 02:26 PM.
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  57. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  58. TopTop #4140
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?


    I don’t want to change
    my thoughts.
    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
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