Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[sandoak]

Thank you, Larry, for a perfect New Year's greeting....

The Great Matter

Cooking, eating, sleeping,
every deed of everyday life
is nothing else than the Great Matter.
Realize this!
So we extend tender care
with a worshipping heart
even to such beings as beasts and birds--
but not only to beasts,
not only to birds,
but to insects too.
Even to grass, to one blade of grass,
even to dust, to one speck of dust.
Sometimes I bow to the dust....


- Soen Nakagawa

[Larry Robinson]

A New Year’s Blessing


Unhurried mornings, greeted with gratitude;
good work for the hand, the heart and the mind;
the smile of a friend, the laughter of children;
kind words from a neighbor, a home dry and warm.


Food on the table, with a place for the stranger;
a glimpse of the mystery behind every breath;
some time of ease in the arms of your lover;
then sleep with a prayer of thanks on your lips;


May all this and more be yours this year
and every year after to the end of your days.


- Larry Robinson

[tezor]

Larry,

I thank you for your dedication in providing these nuggets of truth daily. I read one that spoke to me the day it was available, and now read everyone of them . They seem to follow my needs, and the course of my life in some way. Speaking to the things in my life, as if planned to directly touch me. As we all go through so much in our lives, I couldn't imagine I was the only one feeling this way. In the light of that, I would like to give you my gratitude for your continued presents/presence, both work well for me. May the New Year bless us all with peace, inside our hearts, and across our world. Thank you for your contribution to that peace.

[sandoak]

I agree, and "dedication" is the right word. We feel your gift personally, Larry, but our benefit is collective. Your dedication to bringing poetry into our lives moves us subtly and immeasurably in the direction of health, love, peace, and sanity, as individuals, as a community, as a people.

While we know and appreciate your enthusiasm for poetry, we're all familiar with mornings when nothing is easy. For all the mornings, from the happily easy to the vexingly hard, when you pass along to us poems that touch lives, open hearts, and hone minds, thank you, thank you, thank you.

We are all better for your effort, and pass along the mysterious threads of sensibility. One of the 108 names of Tara is She Who Increases Beauty and Intelligence in the World. Thank you for helping Tara live up to Her name.

[Larry Robinson]

Fantasia: a weekly cycle

come Monday, a man in chainmail robe with
star-stained hands and a bone-handled blade
will mount and ride toward Tuesday whose

abandoned brick kiln houses a curved
bowl shard pointing toward Wednesday
where a wild woman flaunts silk-clad feet

and ash-dark eyes in which is reflected
Thursday hosting a chieftain who issues orders
germane to war and leads young men to the

edge of an acidic lake where Friday, re-floating
a silver-edged saddle once taken across Rumania
in a wooden oxcart, demands that Saturday’s starchily

uniformed Prussian officers pull down barbed wire
from atop a cobbled wall so Sunday, incarcerated,
bitter, may get a view of daffodils, forget-me-

nots and squat cork trees lording it on a grassy bank
where a horse with demented eyes and feet shod in cobalt
rears on back legs and runs pell-mell so come Monday

- David Beckman

[Larry Robinson]

Dirge without Music I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,— They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Larry Robinson]

Thoughts In The Cabin


Why do I suddenly feel free of panic?
Here a summer afternoon, wind-
Blown lake, a cabin of strong logs.


I can live and die with no more
Fame; I'd like ground to walk on,
A few books, occasionally a storm.


I know stories I can tell, and I may
Or may not. There is more
To learn: the wind and the screendoor.


The granary of images, the Norwegian
Lore, the power of Schmad Razum,
Good or evil, success or failure.


Expect something else from me—
Less— and don't rule out
Misdirection, silence, misinformation.


- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

A December Without Snow


Moon smaller each morning
its medium a dense darkness
meadow grasses rimed with frost
ice tipped cedars and pines and
naked oak branch whippets strange
a December without snow


I walk in the woods toward this
pallid moon in a flat gray sky
turn suddenly on a whim and
walk in the opposite direction
surprising a young coyote
I am his first human
he's tracking me in a light trop
we both stop to stare at
one another
sensing something's wrong
the angelus of purity abandons
our sky there are no wise men
no rare gifts
of the eternal and sacred to be
found wrapped around leaves
or the tri-fold bond of acorns


No footprints in this frozen dust
the world turns into its long night
bracts of cones and mistletoe
join deer and hooded juncos
on this path into a dark copse
all of us hoping for lost mornings
when everything drifts white


- Daniel Williams

[Larry Robinson]

Flamenco


"I have four dogs," he tells us, apropo
Of nothing. "One weighs one kilo, five.
They had to operate on her," he says. I ask
Her name. Olivia, then there's Pepe, Prisci,
Juanito. He used to have eleven, when he lived in Avila–
That walled medieval attraction that sits on a rise
Exposed to vicious cold, endless winds. No wonder
Teresa became a saint to withstand such boredom.


But the taxista never mentions Teresa, nor the walls,
Just the cold, the dogs, a life of rural routine.
Then, he asks if we like flamenco. Flamenco:
Gypsy music, what most tourists think
When they think of Spain, what most Spaniards disparage.
A culture of crude, separatist fortune-telling
Thieves, liars, prostitutes and pick-pocket children.


"Would you like to hear some flamenco?"
He slips in a CD and
A cry fills the car, a cry of joy,
Of agony, longing sought for the sake of longing.
To love what one has, the cry says, to want
The heat, the burn of wanting itself.
"I'm the singer," he says,
With neither pride nor humility.His face shines
Like a small, satisfied sun, escaped
From the prison of austere Avila.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Museum of Fools


I imagined I walked the west wing of the Victoria-Albert
Museum and came upon an exhibition entitled,
"The Fools' Journey to the East" Inside were
displays of the relics of the 60's road travels of
Westerners in India. A glass case contained the
tools used for drugs-- chillums and pipes with
filter rags and screens and famous syringes
without the drugs to fill them. Another displayed
samples of shaved hair, beads and prayer shawls-
typical offerings at temples. Necklaces had been
worn, walking staffs carried on pilgrimages by the
illuminated, the likes of Eight-finger Eddie, Brunos
the French one, the Italian, the Spanish one,
Desire the Dutch bride of wonder and Peter the bride
groom of new frontiers, Blind George and Crippled
George and Coffee Beans. These were the names
of heroes in my road mythology, relics of the royalty
that blazed and blundered the paths of the seekers,
bodies some decades gone now.
Emptied of life now, crowns outlasted heads,
legends outlasted limbs. That conch shell on the wall
sounded at the twilight hour when many gathered
around communal fires. Since eternity could not fit
into this temporary exhibit, artifacts were amassed
instead. Costumes were laid out for view along with
those silver belts from Goa that had circled the
waists of the nudes that bounced upon the waves of
the Arabian Sea.
As for me in all of this, I'm still alive.There remains
a wistful sigh in my feelings for these objects, the hand
still warm in that glove someone wore, the earrings and
sacraments my reveling heart still reaches for. Yes, I'm
still here with this requited love for that tribe that adopted
me. I'm stubborn and determined to live when I'm gone.
I will revisit this wing of the museum for years after I fade away.

- Rich Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

The Tamalpais Solution

When asked what he did to take care of himself,
her father John would reply, “That mountain,
three times a week, I walk up that mountain.”

That eminence where meandering plants thrive
in serpentine soils, where the redwood creek
drains into the John Muir-discovered woods,
and where Arroyo Corte Madera del Presidio
cascades to Richardson’s Bay opening radiantly
upon the Golden Gate—indeed that mountain
dominating the horizon beyond his front door
as it had long before doors and houses,
animals, neighbors, humanity, et al.

This mountain looming many ages before
oak and Douglas-fir began sprouting,
eons prior to any Scotsman David Douglas
at Scone Palace 1837 where the sweet quick bread
Scone (rhyming with “John”) also was born.

When the area began budding with people,
the coastal Miwok believed that a witch,
not a good witch so many now prefer, but
a malignant scheming witch cast poisonous
soap root like a fish net over this mountain
where she dwelt glutted with venom at its peak
where no Miwok brave dared tread lest
long-imagined horrors would engulf them.

After pausing for awhile at the top,
John looks over all that has been given,
sits to rest, unwraps his sandwich of
salami, swiss, mustard and lettuce
on rye bread and determines that for now,
“All is good,” and makes preparations
for his return home to the foothills.

With his back to the mountain’s peak,
John misses the Miwok witch, her arms
spread in malevolent welcome—
he, descending, unwittingly escapes
one more time until he will not again.


- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

Mount Tam at dusk

If I walk through my front door,
step off the stoop,
swing my body to the left
and start toward the hills,
the hills that hide from me
the sun’s early morning rays,
the ground beneath my feet falls away,
slowly at first, then with more speed,
till it bottoms out at the first cross street
and begins a rapid ascent
that takes an effort to mount.

And if I stop to catch my breath
half way up this steep slope,
and if the day is over
and the sun is dropping
into the sea
and all around me
will soon grow slowly gray,
and if I turn, as I rest,
look back over the pass,
I have a near clear view
through the crisscrossed wires
that hang from poles on the edge of my sight,
of that familiar shape the earth takes—
the rise and dip and rise and fall
of Mount Tam across the bay.
And if the sky is cloudless,
the summer evening air crystalline and cool,
I see the edge of the earth glow red
along its dark, rough spine—fire red,
as air burns to touch the mountain top,
cools to magenta, to mauve, to light pink, to nearly white,
this thinnest of blankets, this rarest of good night kisses
from the deepening, clear, gray, blue, early evening sky.
And if I turn again toward the hills,
I find a lightness in my step,
a joy in my breath.
- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

Prologue: The Way of Power


I will tell you how it is with Power
The Way is hard
and easily lost.


Take me for example.
Once I had a tiny power
no greater than the breath of a bird,
the power to make words.
But it was more than I could handle.


I was sloppy with it,
spoke too much
and at the wrong times,
used the poems badly
for my own glory.


So the Power was taken away.
Even the breath of a bird
made me vain and arrogant
and I used it to make myself little.


Now I sit still on my porch
and I see how
I am a stupid man
who was made sick
by the bird's breath.


I am dying of it
because the breath got inside me
before I made myself strong
and now it is blowing me away
like a small frail bird
caught in a high wind.


What is left for me
is to die quietly
because my stupidity made a bid noise.
This is what I know
about Power.
- Red Hawk

[Larry Robinson]

Burning in the Rain
Someday compassion would demand
I set myself free of my desire to recreate
my father, indulge in my mother’s losses,
strangle lovers with words, forcing them
to confess for me and take the blame.
Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet
by sheet on the patio and gathered them
into a pyre. I wanted to let them go
in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding
beside the azaleas and ficus bushes,
let them crackle, burst like winged seeds,
let them smolder into gossamer embers—
a thousand gray butterflies in the wind.
Today was that day, but it rained, kept
raining. Instead of fire, water—drops
knocking on doors, wetting windows
into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks.
The garden walls and stones swelling
into ghostlier shades of themselves,
the wind chimes giggling in the storm,
a coffee cup left overflowing with rain.
Instead of burning, my pages turned
into water lilies floating over puddles,
then tiny white cliffs as the sun set,
finally drying all night under the moon
into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today
the rain would not let their lives burn.


- Richard Blanco

[Larry Robinson]

The Railway Children


When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.


Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.


We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,


Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled


We could stream through the eye of a needle.


- Seamus Heaney

[Larry Robinson]

A SONNET FOR EURYDICE

Recall the time we swam beneath the wave.
We never thought of air as something we


might need, and never lived in time. The sea
was all we breathed, and all that Nature ever gave.

And then we went our sep’rate ways. Oh, woe!
Yes, you to Hades’ secret lair, and I,
while playing lyric songs, consumed, did die
a thousand deaths, each one another low.

But, when I came, at last, my life so gone,
and you fell back along our trek, you sang
out Hermes’ name! Oh, he it was who turned

to look! And, as he fell, we then moved on
together to the light. Then strings did hang
above the fire…oh, where they nicely burned!


- Jon Jackson

[Larry Robinson]

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.


- Michele Linfante

[Larry Robinson]

Finch Song


A solitary red male Cassin
played his note for me.
Billowy dark cumulus clouds
the remnant of a storm passed,
pressed the background.
Mountains cast in shadow
and sunlight.

Sun as bright as gold,
cutting through the early afternoon.
My friend’s chest ruffled out
Red, streaked, proud, confident
His note filled the air.
The day holds promise of
something grand.

His notes were not
just for me I know
but the expectation
of a better day and some
grand achievement not understood.
I did not mind.
His soulful note on these
diminished years,
good enough.


- Ernie Carpenter

[Larry Robinson]

The most logical place to begin

is not always the best.
Often the beginning is buried
in the midst of a terrible tangle;
by pulling on the salient thread
you will only tighten the knots.
Start softly.
Sift apart the strands.
Don't be afraid to cut.
Make some knots of your own--
the knit will hold.
Gray goes well with gold.
Slubs of overlapping color
add to texture
and if you have pieces
left over, well...
let the cat play with them,
stuff a pillow,
or save them for a rainy day.


- Barbara Hazard

[Larry Robinson]

The Inward Revolution




One must be willing to stand alone—


in the unknown,


with NO reference to the known


or the past


or any of one's conditioning.


One must stand where no one has stood before


in complete nakedness,


innocence,


and humility.


One must stand in that dark light,


in that groundless embrace,


unwavering and true


to the Reality beyond all self,


not just for a moment


but forever without end.


For then,


that which is sacred,


undivided,


and whole


is born with consciousness


and begins to express itself.


That expression is the salvation of the whole.


It is the ACTIVITY of an inward revolution


brought down into time and space.




- Adyashanti

[hafiza]

I like this poem! Thanks for bringing it to us.

The Inward Revolution

One must be willing to stand alone—

...

- Adyashanti

[Larry Robinson]

Power

Power made me a coat. For a long time I
kept it in the back of my closet. I didn't like to
wear it much, but I always took good care of it.
When I first started wearing it again, it smelled
like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting
better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.

I was afraid if I wore the coat too much
someone would want to take it or else I would
accidentally leave it in the dojo dressing room.
But it has my name on the label now, and it
doesn't really fit anyone else. When people ask
me where I found such a becoming garment, I
tell them about the tailor, Power, who knows
how to make a coat that you grow into. First
you must the courage to approach him
and ask him to make your coat. Then, you
must find the patience inside yourself to
wear the coat until it fits.



- J. Ruth Gendler

[Larry Robinson]

For George Snyder


I Have Walked Along Many Roads


I have walked along many roads,
and opened paths through brush,
I have sailed over a hundred seas
and tied up on a hundred shores.


Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve seen
excursions of sadness,
angry and melancholy
drunkards with black shadows,


and academics in offstage clothes
who watch, say nothing, and think
they know, because they do not drink wine
in the ordinary bars.


Evil men who walk around
polluting the earth. . .


And everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen
men who dance and play,
when they can, and work
the few inches of ground they have.


If they turn up somewhere,
they never ask where they are.
When they take trips, they ride
on the backs of old mules.


They don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.
They drink wine, if there is some,
if not, cool water.


These men are the good ones,
who love, work, walk and dream.
And on a day no different from the rest
they lie down beneath the earth.


- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Bird Watcher]

And this one, Larry... your own, which in October 2011 made me think of George after hearing about his cancer:


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
When the Earth,
For one eternal moment, holds its breath
Before turning from the sun.

This is the hour of magic
When, if you listen
With an open heart and a quiet mind,
You can hear the Ancient Ones, the elders of the forest

Telling the old stories:
Of the chainsaw massacres and the fires;
Of the great ice ages and the birth of mountain ranges;
Of the times long past when they were many and covered the Earth.

They are leaving us now.
When they are gone,
Who will tell these stories?

-Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

A Revolver

Here is a revolver.
It has an amazing language all its own.
It delivers unmistakable ultimatums.
It is the last word.
A simple, little human forefinger can tell a terrible story with it.
Hunger, fear, revenge, robbery, hide behind it.
It is the claw of the jungle made quick and powerful.
It is the club of the savage turned to magnificent precision.
It is more rapid than any judge or court of law.
It is less subtle and treacherous than any one lawyer or ten.
When it has spoken, the case cannot be appealed to the supreme
court, nor any mandamus nor any injunction nor any stay of ex-
ecutation come in and interfere with the original purpose.
And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the
old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the
most revolvers.

- Carl Sandburg

[Larry Robinson]

Clean

The man sitting beside me,
his drink flew straight up
from his glass,
hit the ceiling,
and splashed down
onto his wrist and his hand
and his pants.

“Shit!” I thought,
“this plane’s going to break up,
and we’re going to die.”

And then,
where did this come from?
I thought to ask my dead parents
how it is up there.
Up?
A habit I’d learned.

The old plane continued to buck
and I asked.

My mom came on first.
I’d never spoken to her after she died,
her rigor-mortised arm crooked
like that famous photo
of Chief Big Foot
after the massacre
at Wounded Knee.

“We’re clean up here,”
she said.
“There’s nothing left
of the stuff
of our lives.
We’re just clean,
waiting for our next chance
to live again.”

Then Dad said,
“All our mistakes,
all the hurts,
all our confusions,
are gone.
The good stuff, too.
It’s all gone.
We’re completely clean.
Just us.”

Later,
the bucking stopped.

Our windows were under the wing.
I saw the plane’s wheels
as they hit the runway’s pavement.
They went from being still
to a big smoke of rubber
to spinning
as fast as the pavement
went whizzing past.
We slowed,
and turned,
and taxied over to the terminal.

----------

Three years later,
surrounded by death,
-suicides,
our cat,
Newtown’s massacre,
Susan gone,
Steve sick,
Silvia’s dad could die any day
(each of us, too)-
I walked up the fishtail trail
and thought to ask
Mom and Dad
more about what it was like.

They weren’t there.

They’d left
to inhabit new bodies.

An answer came through though,
from spirit,

“What you’re wondering about
is true.


Your job,
here in this life,
is to get as clean as you can.
Not pure,
that’s worthless.
Just clean.

When Buddha
admired a daisy
in front
of hundreds of listeners,
only one person smiled.

He was clean.
Be like that.”


- Trout Black

[Larry Robinson]

Discover the moment


Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his son and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down
and brings up a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?


Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.


A vagrant wanders empty ruins
Suddenly he's wealthy.


But don't be satisfied with stories,
how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth,
without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.


- Jellaludin Rumi
(translated by Coleman Barks)

[Larry Robinson]

[This is the poem that was read at the inauguration]

One Today

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,

peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the "I have a dream" we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.
One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father's cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day's gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.
Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.
One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.
One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn't give what you wanted.
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.


- Richard Blanco

[Larry Robinson]

Note To Reality

Without even knowing it, I have
believed in you for a long time.

When I looked at my blood under a microscope
I could see truth multiplying over and over.

—Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma
persuaded me

but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass
thrust up above the January snow.
Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse,
from the museum series on European masters.

When my friend died on the way to the hospital
it was not his death that so amazed me

but that the driver of the cab
did not insist upon the fare.

Quotation marks: what should we put inside them?

Shall I say “I” “have been hurt” “by” “you,” you neglectful monster?

I speak now because experience has shown me
that my mind will never be clear for long.

I am more thick-skinned and male, more selfish, jealous, and afraid
than ever in my life.

“For my heart is tangled in thy nets;
my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time...”

The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites.

The parade for the slain police officer
goes past the bakery

and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.

- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

Jerusalem


"Let's be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let's fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine."
-Tommy Olofsson, Sweden


I'm not interested in
who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
people getting over it.


Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother's doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.


Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
"I am native now."
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child's poem says,
"I don't like wars,
they end up with monuments."
He's painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.


Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it's ridiculous.


There's a place in my brain
where hate won't grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.


It's late but everything comes next.


- Naomi Shihab Nye