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  1. TopTop #421
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    To the Light of September

    When you are already here
    you appear to be only
    a name that tells of you
    whether you are present or not

    and for now it seems as though
    you are still summer
    still the high familiar
    endless summer
    yet with a glint
    of bronze in the chill mornings
    and the late yellow petals
    of the mullein fluttering
    on the stalks that lean
    over their broken
    shadows across the cracked ground

    but they all know
    that you have come
    the seed heads of the sage
    the whispering birds
    with nowhere to hide you
    to keep you for later

    you
    who fly with them

    you who are neither
    before nor after
    you who arrive
    with blue plums
    that have fallen through the night

    perfect in the dew

    - W.S. Merwin
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  2. TopTop #422
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    How To Be a Poet

    (to remind myself)

    i

    Make a place to sit down.
    Sit down. Be quiet.
    You must depend upon
    affection, reading, knowledge,
    skill—more of each
    than you have—inspiration,
    work, growing older, patience,
    for patience joins time
    to eternity. Any readers
    who like your poems,
    doubt their judgment.

    ii

    Breathe with unconditional breath
    the unconditioned air.
    Shun electric wire.
    Communicate slowly. Live
    a three-dimensioned life;
    stay away from screens.
    Stay away from anything
    that obscures the place it is in.
    There are no unsacred places;
    there are only sacred places
    and desecrated places.

    iii

    Accept what comes from silence.
    Make the best you can of it.
    Of the little words that come
    out of the silence, like prayers
    prayed back to the one who prays,
    make a poem that does not disturb
    the silence from which it came.

    - Wendell Berry
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  3. TopTop #423
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Five Dogs

    1

    I, the dog they call Spot, was about to sing. Autumn
    Had come, the walks were freckled with leaves, and a tarnished
    Moonlit emptiness crept over the valley floor.
    I wanted to climb the poets' hill before the winter settled in;
    I wanted to praise the soul. My neighbor told me
    Not to waste my time. Already the frost had deepened
    And the north wind, trailing the whip of its own scream,
    Pressed against the house. "A dog's sublimity is never news,"
    He said, "what's another poet in the end?"
    And I stood in the midnight valley, watching the great starfields
    Flash and flower in the wished-for reaches of heaven.
    That's when I, the dog they call Spot, began to sing.


    2

    Now that the great dog I worshipped for years
    Has become none other than myself, I can look within
    And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street
    And bark at them as well. I am an eye that sees itself
    Look back, a nose that tracks the scent of shadows
    As they fall, an ear that picks up sounds
    Before they're born. I am the last of the platinum
    Retrievers, the end of a gorgeous line.
    But there's no comfort being who I am.
    I roam around and ponder fate's abolishments
    Until my eyes are filled with tears and I say to myself, "Oh Rex,
    Forget. Forget. The stars are out. The marble moon slides by."


    3

    Most of my kind believe that Earth
    Is the only planet not covered with hair. So be it,
    I say, let tragedy strike, let the story of everything
    End today, then let it begin again tomorrow. I no longer care.
    I no longer wait in front of the blistered, antique mirror,
    Hoping a shape or a self will rise, and step
    >From that misted surface and say: You there,
    Come with me into the world of light and be whole,
    For the love you thought had been dead a thousand years
    Is back in town and asking for you. Oh no.
    I say, I'm done with my kind. I live alone
    On Walnut Lane, and will until the day I die.


    4

    Before the tremendous dogs are unleashed,
    Let's get the little ones inside, let's drag
    The big bones onto the lawn and clean The Royal Dog Hotel.
    Gypsy, my love, the end of an age has come. Already,
    The howls of the great dogs practicing fills the air,
    And look at that man on all fours dancing under
    The moon's dumbfounded gaze, and look at that woman
    Doing the same. The wave of the future has gotten
    To them and they have responded with all they have:
    A little step forward, a little step back. And they sway,
    And their eyes are closed. O heavenly bodies.
    O bodies of time. O golden bodies of lasting fire.


    5

    All winter the weather came up with amazing results:
    The streets and walks had turned to glass. The sky
    Was a sheet of white. And here was a dog in a phone booth
    Calling home. But nothing would ease his tiny heart.
    For years the song of his body was all of his calling. Now
    It was nothing. Those hymns to desire, songs of bliss
    Would never return. The sky's copious indigo,
    The yellow dust of sunlight after rain, were gone.
    No one was home. The phone kept ringing. The curtains
    Of sleep were about to be drawn, and darkness would pass
    Into the world. And so, and so . . . goodbye all, goodbye dog.

    - Mark Strand
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  4. TopTop #424
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Keeping things Whole

    In a field
    I am the absence
    of field.
    This is
    always the case.
    Wherever I am
    I am what is missing.

    When I walk
    I part the air
    and always
    the air moves in
    to fill the spaces
    where my body's been.

    We all have reasons
    for moving.
    I move
    to keep things whole.

    - Mark Strand
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  5. TopTop #425
    hipbone
    Guest

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Keeping things Whole
    Powerful, simple, obvious, and yet such a fresh insight. Thank you for posting that.
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  6. TopTop #426
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Are There Not Still Fireflies?

    Are there not still fireflies
    Are there not still four-leaf clovers
    Is not our land still beautiful
    our fields not full of armed enemies
    our cities never bombed
    by foreign invaders
    never occupied
    by iron armies
    speaking iron tongues
    Are not our warriors still valiant
    ready to defend us
    Are not our senators
    still wearing fine togas
    Are we not still a great people
    in the greatest country in all the world
    Is this not still a free country
    Are not our fields still ours
    our gardens still full of flowers
    our ships with full cargoes
    Why then do some still fear
    the barbarians coming
    coming coming
    in their huddled masses
    (What is that sound that fills the ear
    drumming drumming?)
    Is not Rome still Rome
    Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
    Are these not the last days of the Roman Empire
    Is not beauty still beauty
    And truth still truth
    Are there not still poets
    Are there not still lovers
    Are there not still mothers
    sisters and brothers
    Is there not still a full moon
    once a month
    Are there not still fireflies
    Are there not still stars at night
    Can we not still see them
    in bowl of night
    signaling to us
    our manifest destiny?

    - Lawrence Ferlinghetti....
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  7. TopTop #427
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Sit Quietly

    If you have time to chatter,
    Read books
    If you have time to read,
    Walk into the mountain, desert, and ocean
    If you have time to walk,
    Sing songs and dance
    If you have time to dance,
    Sit quiety, you Happy Lucky Idiot.

    - Nanao Sakaki
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  8. TopTop #428
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Light

    In the first morning of the world created,
    on the skin of water reflected,
    is the spread of a sun,
    and the sun, like god, is a power
    you cannot see.
    Only what it lights on,
    only what it touches with warmth,
    and yet it always has a shadow at its feet.

    Then there is the sea, the sheer weight of it,
    but the lightness of its creatures,
    some silver as they leap above it,
    and those at the bottom
    making their own light
    in what would of been
    night infinite, as if the sea carries no
    shadows at its feet.

    Then there is the light of the wood decaying
    out by the stagnant pond,
    where the eyes of the prey nearby,
    shine in the dark, betrayed
    when the deer stares one last time
    to see the hunter still follows
    out in the shadow of living trees.

    And bodies of men at war, they say,
    give off light.
    One I knew fished the sea
    and told me of the silver fishes falling
    from the mouth of the netted one.
    As if in the last breath
    perhaps we give back all the swallowed,
    all the taken in, and it is light, after all,
    first and last, we live for, die for.
    We fly toward it
    like those who return from it say.

    But for now, for here, we fly without will
    toward it, drink a glass of it,
    see it through green leaves.
    There, walk toward it.
    Lift it, it has no weight.
    Carry it, breathe it, cherish it.

    You want to know why god is far away
    and we are only shadows at his feet?
    Tell me, how long does it take a moth
    to reach the moon?

    - Linda Hogan
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  9. TopTop #429
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Manifesto

    I know that dying is how we escape
    the rest of our lives. I think that trees
    send us a message: do not believe

    you are lucky. The skins of apples
    and the peeler will marry; it's simply
    a question of when. Believe

    in mourning and carrion birds.
    Look how their fleshy treasures
    dissolve in the sun before their very eyes.

    To love something
    you must have considered what it means
    to do without. You must have thought

    about it - the coefficient of the body
    is another body - but do not forget
    that there are people who are willing

    to staple your palm to your chest.
    Know there are places it isn't wise to go.
    Begin again if you must: there are ways

    to make up for what you have been before,
    the dust in the corners that collects you.
    Sympathy is overrated.

    Rethink how lack
    becomes everyone's master, drives us
    into town and spends our money.

    Quiet: the trees are napping.
    Water meets itself again.
    We reach for the days that precede us

    and the world keeps us from knowing
    too much. The body loves music,
    the abandoned road of it;

    each day a peel
    lengthens in the shadow of blossoms,
    fabric weaves itself into light.

    Pay attention to the patterns. They repeat -
    terraces erode, groves lie fallow -
    order is cognate of joy.

    - Margot Schilpp
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  10. TopTop #430
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Welcome Morning

    There is joy
    in all:
    in the hair I brush each morning,
    in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
    that I rub my body with each morning,
    in the chapel of eggs I cook
    each morning,
    in the outcry from the kettle
    that heats my coffee
    each morning,
    in the spoon and the chair
    that cry "hello there, Anne"
    each morning,
    in the godhead of the table
    that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
    each morning.
    All this is God,
    right here in my pea-green house
    each morning
    and I mean,
    though often forget,
    to give thanks,
    to faint down by the kitchen table
    in a prayer of rejoicing
    as the holy birds at the kitchen window
    peck into their marriage of seeds.
    So while I think of it,
    let me paint a thank-you on my palm
    for this God, this laughter of the morning,
    lest it go unspoken.
    The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
    dies young.

    - Anne Sexton
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  11. TopTop #431
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Blessing Of Angels


    May the angels in their beauty bless you.
    May they turn toward you streams of blessing.
    May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
    To come alive to the eternal within you,
    To all the invitations that quietly surround you.
    May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
    Into sources of refreshment.
    May the Angel of the Imagination enable you
    To stand on the true thresholds,
    At ease with your ambivalence
    And drawn in new directions
    Through the glow of your contradictions.
    May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
    To the unseen suffering around you.
    May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
    Where your life is domesticated and safe,
    Take you to the territories of true otherness
    Where all that is awkward in you
    Can fall into its own rhythm.
    May the Angel of Eros introduce you
    To the beauty of your senses
    To celebrate your inheritance
    As a temple of the holy spirit.
    May the Angel of Justice disturb you
    To take the side of the poor and the wronged.
    May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
    In worth and self-respect,
    That you may live with the dignity
    That presides in your soul.
    May the Angel of Death arrive only
    When your life is complete
    And you have brought every given gift
    To the threshold where its infinity can shine.
    May all the Angels be your sheltering
    And joyful guardians.

    — John O’Donohue
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  12. TopTop #432
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Security

    Tomorrow will have an island. Before night
    I always find it. Then on to the next island.
    These places hidden in the day separate
    and come forward if you beckon.
    But you have to know they are there before they exist.

    Some time there will be a tomorrow without any island.
    So far, I haven't let that happen, but after
    I'm gone others may become faithless and careless.
    Before them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,
    and without any hope they will stare at the horizon.

    So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:
    to be a discoverer you hold close whatever
    you find, and after a while you decide
    what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,
    you turn to the open sea and let go.

    * - William Stafford
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  13. TopTop #433
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Songster


    Oh sweet loquacious songster
    I am your eager ear
    riding your streams and trills.

    Be my companion
    so once your notes have risen
    beyond range

    into silence broken
    only by a breeze
    weighing on the leaves,

    I will not forget
    my pledge made
    during your ecstatic bursts.

    Sing to me, sing!
    So my heart may turn
    in twilight's ebb

    and through the night
    be drawn
    along liquid ways

    until your dawn song
    breaks its banks again.

    - Raphael Block
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  14. TopTop #434
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Sleeping in the Forest

    I thought the earth remembered me, she
    took me back so tenderly, arranging
    her dark skirts, her pockets
    full of lichens and seeds. I slept
    as never before, a stone
    on the riverbed, nothing
    between me and the white fire of the stars
    but my thoughts, and they floated
    light as moths among the branches
    of the perfect trees. All night
    I heard the small kingdoms breathing
    around me, the insects, and the birds
    who do their work in the darkness. All night
    I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
    with a luminous doom. By morning
    I had vanished at least a dozen times
    into something better.

    - Mary Oliver
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  15. TopTop #435
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Pinnacle

    Both of us understood
    what a privilege it was
    to be out for a walk
    with each other
    we could tell from our different
    heights that this
    kind of thing happened
    so rarely that it might
    not come round again
    for me to be allowed
    even before I
    had started school
    to go out for a walk
    with Miss Giles
    who had just retired
    from being a teacher all her life

    she was beautiful
    in her camel hair coat
    that seemed like the autumn leaves
    our walk was her idea
    we liked listening to each other
    her voice was soft and sure
    and we went our favorite way
    the first time just in case
    it was the only time
    even though it might be too far
    we went all the way
    up the Palisades to the place
    we called the pinnacle
    with its park at the cliff's edge
    overlooking the river
    it was already a secret
    the pinnacle
    as we were walking back
    when the time was later
    than we had realized
    and in fact no one
    seemed to know where we had been
    even when she told them
    no one had heard of the pinnacle

    and then where did she go

    - W. S. Merwin
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  16. TopTop #436
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Frederick Douglass

    When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
    and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
    usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
    when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
    reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
    than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
    this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
    beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
    where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
    this man, superb in love and logic, this man
    shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
    not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
    but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
    fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

    - Robert E. Hayden
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  17. TopTop #437
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Place In The Heart

    Two soldiers
    are preparing to surrender.
    Right now they are just hunched down in a bunker,
    to get below the fire fight and also because,
    curled up, you can depend for a moment
    on the plainness of gravel,
    the kindness of the dark—
    its remote memory of a cave or a mother’s arms.
    A trench like this is on the way to some other place
    where they might be less alone and afraid,
    so they didn’t plan to be here.

    They have planned to surrender though.
    One of them has a white cloth tied to a stick
    gripped tightly in his right hand.
    The white flag belongs to the nation
    without a name.
    It doesn’t have a written history
    or plans of any kind
    and it’s not represented at the UN.
    But he hasn’t raised that blank flag yet.
    We know that he’s right handed.
    It’s possible that the other hand has in it
    something important
    like the air-dropped leaflets on how to surrender,
    but you don’t usually practice
    waving a white flag,
    so yes, you would grasp it in your dominant hand.
    And a white cloth a couple of feet square
    is not something that you just have in your pockets;
    you must have brought it with you,
    and a thick, strong stick, too,
    you can’t find that just lying around in miles of sand.

    Unfortunately, despite the provision of the white cloth
    despite the effort of finding a stick,
    and of hunching over as far as they could,
    in a posture as touching
    as yours or mine would be,
    and despite having no visible wounds,
    they are dead.

    And the failed magic of cloth, stick, hunching over,
    goes on reaching, unfailed, in another dimension,
    struggling, struggling to touch.
    It shows how intimate you are, my enemy,
    and how much like me.
    Now that I have seen your death,
    I shall have to live for you—
    I can’t help but carry you so that you can see,
    and smile, and embrace;
    I can't help but make for you
    a place in my heart.

    - John Tarrant
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  18. TopTop #438
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Cave Painting At Font du Gaume

    Of course, even his bones
    are now dust,
    his flowing mane
    taken by the wind,
    those sturdy hooves
    and solid flesh consumed
    and reborn in endless forms.

    Even so, through two hundred centuries
    of darkness and lamplight
    he is still running free
    across that vast savannah of time.

    And the hand that captured,
    in a few spare lines
    on the limestone wall,
    that wild grace,
    sending it down through the years -
    hand of my ancestor,
    hand of our ancestor -
    has long since returned
    to the formless.

    A day will come,
    certainly,
    when all this
    will be gone:
    you and I,
    the painting,
    even the wall,
    carved by ages of
    drip and flow,
    through uplifted memories
    of countless tiny beings
    who spent their short lives
    in that primordial sea.

    And yet this beauty -
    this grace -
    offers itself to us
    in this moment,
    the only time we have.

    - Larry Robinson
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  19. TopTop #439
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Climbing Along the River

    Willows never forget how it feels
    to be young.

    Do you remember where you came from?
    Gravel remembers.

    Even the upper end of the river
    believes in the ocean.

    Exactly at midnight
    yesterday sighs away.

    What I believe is,
    all animals have one soul.

    Over the land they love
    they crisscross forever.

    - William Stafford
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  20. TopTop #440
    Magick's Avatar
    Magick
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Wow! That is an amazing poem! M

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Cave Painting At Font du Gaume

    Of course, even his bones
    are now dust,
    his flowing mane
    taken by the wind,
    those sturdy hooves
    and solid flesh consumed
    and reborn in endless forms.

    Even so, through two hundred centuries
    of darkness and lamplight
    he is still running free
    across that vast savannah of time.

    And the hand that captured,
    in a few spare lines
    on the limestone wall,
    that wild grace,
    sending it down through the years -
    hand of my ancestor,
    hand of our ancestor -
    has long since returned
    to the formless.

    A day will come,
    certainly,
    when all this
    will be gone:
    you and I,
    the painting,
    even the wall,
    carved by ages of
    drip and flow,
    through uplifted memories
    of countless tiny beings
    who spent their short lives
    in that primordial sea.

    And yet this beauty -
    this grace -
    offers itself to us
    in this moment,
    the only time we have.

    - Larry Robinson
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  21. TopTop #441
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Return

    A little too abstract, a little too wise,
    It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
    It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
    Let the rich life run to the roots again.
    I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
    And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
    I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
    In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
    I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
    That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
    The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
    So that they cannot strike, can hardly fly.
    Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain,
    Oh noble
    Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.

    - Robinson Jeffers
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  22. TopTop #442
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    After Apple Picking

    My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
    Toward heaven still,
    And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
    Beside it, and there may be two or three
    Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
    But I am done with apple-picking now.
    Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
    The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
    I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
    I got from looking through a pane of glass
    I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
    And held against the world of hoary grass.
    It melted, and I let it fall and break.
    But I was well
    Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
    And I could tell
    What form my dreaming was about to take.
    Magnified apples appear and disappear,
    Stem end and blossom end,
    And every fleck of russet showing clear.
    My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
    It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
    I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
    And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
    The rumbling sound
    Of load on load of apples coming in.
    For I have had too much
    Of apple-picking: I am overtired
    Of the great harvest I myself desired.
    There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
    Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
    For all
    That struck the earth,
    No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
    Went surely to the cider-apple heap
    As of no worth.
    One can see what will trouble
    This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
    Were he not gone,
    The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
    Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
    Or just some human sleep.

    - Robert Frost
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  23. TopTop #443
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Alone Looking at the Mountain

    All the birds have flown up and gone;
    A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
    We never tire of looking at each other -
    Only the mountain and I.

    - Li Po
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  24. TopTop #444
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Heat of Autumn

    The heat of autumn
    is different from the heat of summer.
    One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
    One is a dock you walk out on,
    the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
    and the river each day a full measure colder.
    A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
    Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
    rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
    by color. That’s autumn heat:
    her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
    gold buckles with gold, setting each
    on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
    and calling it pleasure.

    - Jane Hirshfield
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  25. TopTop #445
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Harvest Bow

    As you plaited the harvest bow
    You implicated the mellowed silence in you
    In wheat that does not rust
    But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
    Into a knowable corona,
    A throwaway love-knot of straw.

    Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
    And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
    Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
    Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
    I tell and finger it like braille,
    Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

    And if I spy into its golden loops
    I see us walk between the railway slopes
    Into an evening of long grass and midges,
    Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
    An auction notice on an outhouse wall--
    You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

    Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
    For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
    Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
    Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
    Nothing: that original townland
    Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

    The end of art is peace
    Could be the motto of this frail device
    That I have pinned up on our deal dresser--
    Like a drawn snare
    Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
    Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

    - Seamus Heaney
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  26. TopTop #446
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Fog Drip

    Fog drip, they say,
    replenishes the aquifer.
    Redwood needles pull
    moisture from the mist,
    guiding it down to the roots -
    and below.

    Even in the driest years
    these patient old ones
    remain ever green.

    Some elders are like that.
    They find the goodness there is
    and draw it down,
    sustaining themselves
    while feeding the deeper stream.

    They don’t demand attention;
    they don’t seek profit or approval.
    Usually they don’t even know
    they are doing this.
    Do the redwoods know - or care -
    where the water goes?

    Francis of Assissi called down grace
    by the simple act of gratitude.
    The foxes and the sparrows
    drank deeply from his fog drip.

    - Larry Robinson
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  27. TopTop #447
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    El Paletero

    His fingers stop ringing the string of small brass bells and he peddles harder and faster as he pulls out of a lazy neighborhood street and onto the avenue of honking horns and screeching tires. Cars speed past this mobile vendor, some a little too close for comfort drawing concerned or vexed glances from harried drivers.

    He offers, paletas; frozen fruit bars of coconut, strawberry, tamarind, watermelon. How many can he possibly sell today; enough to feed his family? The back of his shirt is dark with sweat, but one must do what one must to meet his obligations; si no trabajes no comes (if you don’t work, you don’t eat.)

    A sparrow who lives this adage pulls a worm from out of a lawn where cats are known to dwell – a risky business indeed. He flies upward into a street tree eyeing the man who peddles the large insulated box on bicycle wheels passing below.

    El Paletero relaxes his tempo as he rides onto another neighborhood street and like a maestro he begins working his bells, hoping to lure those with a sweet tooth and a little extra to spend.

    The sparrow bounces branch to branch until he is at his nest then places bits of today’s earnings into anxious little beaks as children line up at the curb hopping with excitement clutching coins in their small hands.

    - Armando Garcia-Dávila


    Workers get a meal and a message
    Poet's 'The Bread of Words' an opportunity to bring poetry to unconventional settings


    CHRISTOPHER CHUNG/ PD
    Armando Garcia-Davila reads his poetry for Gaddis Nursery employees on Thursday, September 24, 2009.

    By DAN TAYLOR
    THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

    Published: Friday, September 25, 2009 at 4:03 a.m.
    Last Modified: Friday, September 25, 2009 at 4:03 a.m.
    The workers who gathered at noon Thursday in a warehouse at Santa Rosa's Gaddis Nursery probably came for Armando Garcia-Dávila's home-cooked chili verde and refried beans as much as his poetry.

    "The food is my bait," Armando Garcia-Dávila, an active Sonoma County poet for the past 12 years, said with a quick grin. "If the poetry's good enough, they'll stay. If not, then it's my own fault."

    The event was an experiment, the first in the poet's new "The Bread of Words" program. It's funded by a $500 grant -- enough for gas and the food -- from Arts Sonoma, a program of exhibits and performances running through early October in unconventional venues all over Sonoma County.

    People have to work and they have to eat lunch, Garcia-Dávila reasoned, so if they couldn't come to poetry readings, he decided he'd take his poetry to them. It seemed to work.

    "Well, I came for the food, and to listen a little bit," said Jesus Romero, who has has worked at the wholesale nursery for three years.

    A dozen Gaddis employees, almost half the permanent work force, came to hear readings in both Spanish and English by Garcia-Dávila and Beatriz Lagos, a published poet and novelist who was born in Argentina and settled in Petaluma four decades ago.

    Even third-generation nursery owner Bill Gaddis, who gave the program his blessing, stopped by.

    "People need something in their lives besides work and taking care of the family," he said.

    Garcia-Dávila, reading from one of his two self-published poetry collections, spoke of immigrants and their Americanized children, who wonder if they'll be able to find hamburgers while visiting their grandparents in the old country.

    Lagos, who has published seven books of poetry and four novels in Spain and Mexico, related stories of Argentina, and her own discovery of local wine upon her arrival in Sonoma County.

    At the end of lunch hour, Garcia-Dávila was enthusiastic about continuing his series, and ready to keep cooking and reading until his money runs out.

    "They stayed, they listened and they were attentive," the poet said. "I'm going to do this again next Thursday at the Graton Labor Center."
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  28. TopTop #448
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Monarch and Mulberry

    Listen—those two M’s—mulberry tree,
    crawling with monarchs,

    that birdshit beautiful
    mess, staining bare feet and slopping

    cars, and under the leave’s web of light all of us
    squatting, pushing tiny free toys

    finger-deep into the soft, purple loam,
    all of us plucking those live yellow petals

    wing by wing, all of us ignorant
    of the butterfly’s migration to Mexico.

    Who knew then they traveled
    so far? Who knew there was anywhere

    to go, or how years later
    there would be so little left—

    that tract of land razed flat
    and vinyled up in every shade

    of beige, every clean drive ending
    with a rubbermaid mailbox and a bradford

    pear popping its popcorn styrofoam
    of blooms? Who can remember the

    brambles and the rusted fence, the darkwater
    paths of brittle-limbed weed trees,

    and the butterflies, who remembers
    so many, those milkweed-nursed sunbursts

    of the cricketing world now for sale
    in double-panes of glass on Bleecker,

    a junk table of blue morphos and blue-winged
    cicadas, some even shellacked into pendants,

    shrinky-dink art debris bought and locked
    in a box of gum and plastic beads and a puffed-up

    sand dollar rattling its five tiny dove bones,
    a bleached legend of goodwill and peace?

    Oh, monarch. Not you. You don't remember.
    And no wonder we feel this way now, the world

    less of a thing to love. For us, we barely remember
    that humid summer, the fan oscillating, the kitchen,

    always the fly-speck kitchen. We were watching you,
    all of you, flit in the mulberry out back, and after, because

    we were children, we tracked that crushed fruit across
    the linoleum. After that, the sound of hammers and crows

    through the open window, then somebody needs to
    cut down that goddamn tree. He was the one said that,

    and she agreed. And while we were busy not caring
    anything our parents said, there you were, all of you,

    no more able to steer yourself
    than plastic grocery bags or receipts or anything

    littered to the wind, but you knew something
    we didn’t—exactly where to go.

    - Nickole Brown
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  29. TopTop #449
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson's
    *
    *
    "Where is your home," the interviewer asked him.
    *
    Here.
    *
    "No, no," the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
    "when you are where you actually live."
    *
    Now it was his turn to think, perhaps the translation?
    *
    - Jane Hirshfield
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  30. TopTop #450
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Speech To The Garden Club Of America

    (With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

    Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
    There are so many outcomes that are worse.
    But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
    By a sustained explosion through the air,
    Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
    Than we should go. The world may end in fire
    As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
    As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
    Of temporary progress, digging up
    An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
    The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
    To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
    Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
    As wrong as to make war to get along
    And be at peace, to falsify the land
    By sciences of greed, or by demand
    For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
    The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
    But why not play it cool? Why not survive
    By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
    Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
    By going back to school, this time in gardens
    That burn no hotter than the summer day.
    By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
    By goods that bind us to all living things,
    Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
    The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
    Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
    Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
    A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
    The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
    That turns in place, year after year, to heal
    It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
    That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
    An anti-life of radiance and fume
    That burns as power and remains as doom,
    The garden delves no deeper than its roots
    And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

    - Wendell Berry
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