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  1. TopTop #4771
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Gratitude


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



    reclining in the long valleys of your body.
    Send me your chariots, your champion angels,
    warriors of the spirit, whose love rises in speech,



    in gesture, in wordless looks, bathed in the most
    sublime rose waters; even in anguish for the suffering
    of others. Send me your thoroughbreds,


    heavy with bridle; I will race alongside you,
    breathing my thanksgiving for the idealism of youth,
    for the wild and holy power of the earnest


    novitiate; for conversations between fathers,
    mothers, sons and daughters, blooming in the
    rising cumulus of purity and courage, in the altitudes


    of high regard, the vitality of innocence, the awakening
    of inquiry. Let me travel beside you, raining down with
    the pounding hooves of your galloping love.


    - Gary Horvitz
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  2. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  3. TopTop #4772
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Miracles


    Here I sit at my computer on 11-11-11, reading hours of emails and petitions and forwards about Delaware River fracking, and Mississippi’s rejection of personhood for women’s eggs, and move-your-money-day, and tar sands pipelines, and constitutional amendments to limit campaign funds, and Occupy Oakland’s massive challenge to stay non-violent in this most violence-racked city, and polar bears without ice floes, and torture of lesbians in Ecuador, and, and,............ and I am overcome with gratitude:


    .... to Hippocrates and Hahnemann and Curie and Pasteur and Salk and my Dr. Michael and Debbie and herb gardens and bees and sunshine and rain and the loyalty of seed, for helping me be here still, octogenarian on fire


    .... to my parents and grandparents and their ancestors for their good genes and their good sense to cross the daunting Atlantic to labor in coal mines and cigar factories to make me, to make me better, to make me a better life


    .... to Ben Franklin and Tom Edison and Singer and to my furnace for keeping me warm, and to all the other comforting and safety-making inventions in this shelter where I can close my eyes in sleep unafraid


    .... to those who created language out of grunts, and Gutenberg, and my Dad who taught me to read while tending to my sixth-year chickenpox, and to Miss Hanson who liked my third-grade poems, and to those colonials who created Rutgers University without ever having me in mind


    .... to a lifetime of listening wonderment for the Mozart melodies that reside in my head, my brain’s personal MP3 downloads


    .... to Susan and the other suffragettes who marched and suffered nights in jail for my right to be a woman voting, though they never knew me personally


    .... to Ghandi and MLK and Mother Theresa and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Friends and COs and Occupy-all, all those who hold the light


    .... to the power of those who loved me and love me still, and by so doing keep me whole still, whether they walk the earth or no longer grace it


    .... to whatever mysteries keep my mind alert and capable of outrage, keep my soul alive and capable of gratitude


    .... to my diaphragm that keeps me breathing, I know not why


    - Vilma Ginzberg
    Last edited by Barry; 12-01-2020 at 12:37 PM.
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  4. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  5. TopTop #4773
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Another Shovel


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

    Our village weave has unraveled and
    Our darkness finds our discontentment
    In limited breath
    Trying to soothe
    Holding brokenness

    Here I found a small and jeweled freedom-fighter
    A winged-one on the ground
    Cold, expired
    On some Pacific Flyway November patio, mine

    As all the losses came home to roost
    As ghosts still wrapped on their gurneys,
    In every state, in every country
    Lie hampered and uncertain
    Of their transition onward
    Yet here was one more -

    A small bird, dead on the ground
    Bearing all the cruelty of not being able
    To draw near today to the
    Heft of reparation so needed
    To the salve that family and flock bring
    To the depth of sadness
    Of those who died in
    Foreign arms on sterile wards

    No union actualized
    No familiar hands of belonging
    We have to reimagine such warmth of life,
    All for another time


    - P Gregory Guss

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  6. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  7. TopTop #4774
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Turkeys




    Sometimes we saw shadows of gods
    in the trees; silenced, we went on.
    Sometimes the dog would bound off
    over the snow, into the forest.
    Sometimes a tree had twenty
    or more black turkeys in it, each
    seeming the size of a small black bear.
    We remember them for their care
    for their kind ever since we watched the big hen
    in the very top of the tree shaking
    load after load of apples down to the flock.
    Sometimes I felt I would never
    come out of the woods, I thought
    its deeper darkness might absorb me
    or feed me to the black turkeys
    and I would cry out for the dog
    and the dog would not answer.


    - Galway Kinnell
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  9. TopTop #4775
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Still

    I said I will find what is lowly
    and put the roots of my identity
    down there:
    each day I'll wake up
    and find the lowly nearby,
    a handy focus and reminder,
    a ready measure of my significance,
    the voice by which I would be heard,
    the wills, the kinds of selfishness
    I could
    freely adopt as my own:

    but though I have looked everywhere,
    I can find nothing
    to give myself to:
    everything is

    magnificent with existence, is in
    surfeit of glory:
    nothing is diminished,
    nothing has been diminished for me:

    I said what is more lowly than the grass:
    ah, underneath,
    a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
    I looked at it closely
    and said this can be my habitat: but
    nestling in I
    found
    below the brown exterior
    green mechanisms beyond the intellect
    awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

    and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
    I found a beggar:
    he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
    him any attention: everybody went on by:
    I nestled in and found his life:
    there, love shook his body like a devastation:
    I said
    though I have looked everywhere
    I can find nothing lowly
    in the universe:

    I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
    transfigurations of size and shape and place:

    at one sudden point came still,
    stood in wonder:
    moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
    with being!

    - A. R. Ammons
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  10. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  11. TopTop #4776
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    More Than Something Else


    Something Else.
    Some one else
    Some where else


    That place is here,
    In my home,
    We are here.


    I am brown,
    Brown hair,
    Brown eyes,
    Like cookies Feather tells me, and I like to think it’s perfectly
    cooked Pueblo cookies.


    My kids are something else,
    9 different shades of brown,
    All beautiful.


    My grandkids are something else,
    4 brown eyes, 2 blue eyes,
    All Native,
    Definitely something else, as I watch them be rowdy, be loving,
    be here in this world.


    We are here
    On this earth
    In this time and place


    In our homes,
    On our lands,
    In the cities,
    With our families, laughing loudly, cooking together, protecting
    each other.


    We are something else
    With our songs
    Our dances.


    We pray with corn meal,
    Eagle feathers,
    Medicine bundles,
    Burn some sage, make sure to acknowledge the four directions,
    as the sun comes up.


    We are the something else,
    Who were here,
    To greet Christopher Columbus


    We were born from
    This earth,
    Crawled out of the center,
    Of our mother’s womb, we are important, we are strong.


    We are something else,
    We are Pueblo people, Plains people, Forest People, Desert
    people, Nomadic people, Cliff dwellers, Ocean fishers, Lake and
    river fishers, hunters, medicine collectors, horse riders, artists,
    speakers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, we are human beings.
    We are something else,
    We are Native People,
    Indigenous to this land.
    We are a proud,
    Something else.


    - Rainy Dawn Ortiz
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  12. Gratitude expressed by 7 members:

  13. TopTop #4777
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Psalm


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


    Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
    or alights on the roadblock at the border?
    A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad
    while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won't stop bobbing!


    Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant
    between the border guard's left and right boots
    blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and “Where to?"


    Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
    prevailing on every continent!
    Isn't that a privet on the far bank
    smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
    And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
    would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?


    And how can we talk of order overall?
    when the very placement of the stars
    leaves out doubting just what shines for whom?


    Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
    And dust blowing all over the steppes
    as if they hadn't been partitioned!
    And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
    that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!


    Only what is human can truly be foreign.
    The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.


    - Wislawa Szymborska
    (translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
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  14. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  15. TopTop #4778
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    We Have Lost So Much


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


    We have lost so much
    stunned, shaking our heads
    our aching necks.


    In the empty streets
    even when we meet
    Someone
    our masks avoid speech
    our eyes,
    hard to say, collide
    but that’s what it feels like
    holding my head
    Thinking of my friend
    Carefully
    letting the bird rest
    under a nearby bit of bush.
    A little quiet, maybe
    it will find its way.
    There’s a river nearby
    all the empty buildings.


    - Mary Swanson
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  16. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  17. TopTop #4779

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    This poem makes its point.
    Here's the lyric to a song by a friend of mine, about how masks reveal the SOUL, the Universal, more than faces do without masks! I find it very interesting! There's a video that I can't post because of copyright issues, but I hope to add a link to an mp3 audio file. The lyrics and the music too are by Mischa Rutenberg.
    “Eye to Eye to I”



    Why do you worry about a little thing
    Like a fabric mask that will save your skin
    Look again you might find a hidden grace
    What you lose when you choose to cover your face
    Then you’ll see Eye to eye to I …….eye to eye to I


    We wear our face to mask ourselves
    This is the act at which we all excel
    So many smiles that tell bold lies
    Rarely deliver as advertised


    Our mouths are sealed our eyes revealed
    Maybe now we will share what is real
    We no longer need this mask of lies
    You lose your face when the ego dies
    Take a moment and you’ll realize
    All we need to see is eye to eye
    Eye to eye to I


    All my life I have hidden the truth
    Behind the smiles and the games of youth
    Now I find all the glamour gone
    Let go the nonsense and move along


    Our mouths are sealed our eyes revealed
    Maybe now we will share what is real
    We no longer need this mask of lies
    You lose your face when the ego dies
    Take a moment and you’ll realize
    All we need to see is eye to eye
    Eye to eye to I


    Why do you worry about a little thing like
    A small piece of fabric that will save your skin
    Look again you will find a hidden grace
    What you lose when you choose to cover your face
    Then you’ll see Eye to eye to I
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  18. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  19. TopTop #4780
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Four Quartets: The East Coker


    III


    O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
    The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
    The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
    The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
    Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
    Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
    And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
    And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
    And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
    And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
    Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
    I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
    Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
    The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
    With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
    And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
    And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
    Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
    And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
    And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
    Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
    Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
    I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
    For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
    For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
    But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
    Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
    So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
    Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
    The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
    The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
    Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
    Of death and birth.



    - T.S. Eliot
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  20. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  21. TopTop #4781
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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

    Heart, lungs and gut gone to the gnaw
    of insects, the intact hull of her
    beached on duff, prickly
    oak and pine needles, coyote scat
    in the crook of her knee --

    the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
    ignoring the heap of dung
    red with madrone berries,
    pale pits pearling through.
    She noses the foreleg
    where scraps of hide cling to bone.

    Imagine the first flick of tail,
    ripple of skin under summer flies,
    and how this fawn died.
    The woods are full of stories
    in rotting trunks, cool shadows
    and bones like these, whitened
    by winters she hadn’t seen.

    But what of her stays with me?
    Days later in my lumpy green chair
    by the window, cat curved
    around my feet on the ottoman,
    the dog denned under the table,
    teacup on the sill, and I think

    of the fox -- its narrow bloated body
    on the road, a plastic bag
    snagged on its foot, ballooning
    beside blood slicked fur.

    Will the silence of their absence rise
    above the din of cities? Will their ghosts
    stumble through strip malls and suburbs
    looking for lost meadows, jostle
    at the on-ramps distracting drivers
    with a sudden vague unease?

    Will our grief surprise us?
    Will we wonder at our loneliness?



    - Elizabeth Herron

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  22. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  23. TopTop #4782
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Place Where We Are Right


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


    The place where we are right
    is hard and trampled
    like a yard.


    But doubts and loves
    dig up the world
    like a mole, a plow
    and a whisper will be heard in the place
    where the ruined
    house once stood.


    - Yehuda Amichai
    (translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)
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  24. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  25. TopTop #4783
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In Fire Season, Rain


    The soft smoke of hard rain
    drilling down through tree bones.
    The hiss and steam of quenched fire —
    rain nipping flame’s root, gray mud of ash.
    Rain tap slapping your hat. Rain gloves.
    Rain making your coat heavy, your neck cold.
    Rain washing what was seared, culled, fallen, lost.
    Where fire fed, rain offering rest, restoration.
    Rain turning eye-salt to rivulets, rivulets
    to rivers wheresoever many weep as one.
    Rain thrust deep in earth, seeking seeds.
    Rain taking its own sweet time.
    Earth’s thirst for first rain —
    never to be cursed again.


    - Kim Stafford
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  26. TopTop #4784
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    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 continents;
    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




    Climate Change and California’s Favorite Trees
    (click for article)


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    Last edited by Barry; 12-12-2020 at 12:30 PM.
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  27. TopTop #4785
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Vote



    My eyes wing out over misted fields
    Dappled with islands of snow geese and sandhill cranes
    I’m in my car making calls
    To Hispanics in Arizona: “Your vote counts!”
    This is our chance to save our country! Think of your children,
    All the dreamers, young and old!
    Our land. The air! The water! Stand for women, welcome and equality
    Imagine a future worth living


    Ten white show geese leap up from the water
    Pure soft wings like angels against the blue
    Trumpeting, boisterous, shouting Freedom!
    Announcing themselves here! - here, on this land
    “See this place?” they trumpet. “See this water, these grasses and
    reeds? They are ours and we are theirs!
    They have been ours since the wind was here, that
    Wind we sailed down on from the north you call
    Canada, Artic, Alaska, Yukon
    We are immigrants, perpetually. See our strong
    Feather shafts? Our tough sinewed chests?”


    So go vote! Drive or walk – crawl if you have to –
    Get to the polling place and check
    That box marked inclusion!
    Let your ballot shout for all the people and the creatures
    Sing embrace and welcome.
    Seat leaders who celebrate our American brother/sisterhood
    Elect an America that reveres the land and safeguards its future


    Now there! Look! An approaching V of Canada geese
    Whose visas are not required.
    Are you voting for Biden and Harris?
    Yes! Bless you! Dios te bendiga!
    Tendremos un futuro! Going today, yes?
    Get there early. Be sure your voice is heard!
    Every one counts – especially in Arizona!


    The air explodes with the cackle cries of cranes
    Sandhills sailing just overhead, shouting, swooping down from
    The northern Rockies, mountains marching
    Right across borders, free as crane flight. A ranger
    Says smaller, stronger Sandhills come from Siberia.
    Siberia! If I ask their nationality, what
    Will they answer? Daughters and sons of the wind?
    Of the river courses, of marshy fields north and south


    You’re taking your mamá – y su cuñado?
    Your mom and brother-in-law are going, too?
    That’s great! And call some friends! Todos los amigos que pueden votar.
    All that are able to vote must vote, must go to the polls – when they get done
    With their work, their service, their gift to this country


    The flooded fields are a cacophony of ducks – a dozen kinds, all
    Colors and sizes – and voices! Like America
    Cottonwoods ring the fields, cottonwoods burnished now, but
    Greening in the spring to welcome throngs of songbirds just
    Up from Central America – the long jungle isthmus, sending north its
    Winged jewels of scarlet and vermillion, lapis and bright yellow.
    Where is their home? Which is their patria?


    And here we are – squawking together. Dancing in these fields
    In this place. And Coyote! See him, loping past?
    The shaman who miraculously survived the scourge, that centuries-long
    Determined purge of the wild, exterminating native peoples
    And wolves, and whatever wild things might threaten the
    Fierce taming of the continent. A boundless continent of ancient forests
    Felled for their wood.

    The same Scourge some still desperately want to continue,
    Which would – if given the chance – drain, plow and replant these wet misty
    Wild waving fields into straight civilized rows of
    Profitable, decent crops.
    That Old Greedy Power, unseeing, unheeding of
    The boundless riches of wildness. Of diversity, of many colors.

    Their Scourge would hack down or spray down or curse down
    The hundred kinds of forbs and flowers, sweet sedge, red reeds, tall grass
    – and small I see all about me here in this Refuge set aside by the seeing Heartful
    To give us a glimpse of how it was, this stretching, singing land
    This billowing tapestry of textures and tones,
    Wondrous seeds, whispering reeds


    Refuge. Might America be a refuge again? For its dreaming, flowing immigrants?
    Can it rejoice in a rainbow of faces? Can it be a refuge of sanity and new understanding?
    A sacred place to its creatures , waters, health and life? Can it honor its native peoples at last?
    Will it hold all its families and their futures in trust? Can it be a place to thrive and belong?
    This might be much to ask, but we must ask and then we must try. Because we dream, we must act!


    Fernando, Ofelia, Rodrigo, Jose!
    I call you because I can’t call everyone.
    Will you vote then for inclusion and goodness?
    You will? For health and sanidad? For brotherly respect and kindness to the land?
    For fresh water and for these geese and cranes and coyote?
    For all our place and our many peoples?

    - Garth Gilchrist
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  28. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  29. TopTop #4786
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Declaration of Interdependence
    Such has been the patient sufferance…
    We’re a mother’s bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We’re her three children pleading for bubble gum and their father. We’re the three minutes she steals to page through a tabloid, needing to believe even stars’ lives are as joyful and as bruised. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury…
    We’re her second job serving an executive absorbed in his Wall Street Journal at a sidewalk café shadowed by skyscrapers. We’re the shadows of the fortune he won and the family he lost. We’re his loss and the lost. We’re a father in a coal town who can’t mine a life anymore because too much and too little has happened, for too long.
    A history of repeated injuries and usurpations…
    We’re the grit of his main street’s blacked-out windows and graffitied truths. We’re a street in another town lined with royal palms, at home with a Peace Corps couple who collect African art. We’re their dinner-party talk of wines, wielded picket signs, and burned draft cards. We’re what they know: it’s time to do more than read the New York Times, buy fair-trade coffee and organic corn.
    In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress…
    We’re the farmer who grew the corn, who plows into his couch as worn as his back by the end of the day. We’re his TV set blaring news having everything and nothing to do with the field dust in his eyes or his son nested in the ache of his arms. We’re his son. We’re a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We’re the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We’re the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn’t shot.
    We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…
    We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…
    We’re the dead, we’re the living amid the flicker of vigil candlelight. We’re in a dim cell with an inmate reading Dostoevsky. We’re his crime, his sentence, his amends, we’re the mending of ourselves and others. We’re a Buddhist serving soup at a shelter alongside a stockbroker. We’re each other’s shelter and hope: a widow’s fifty cents in a collection plate and a golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for the cure.
    We hold these truths to be self-evident …
    We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.

    - Richard Blanco
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  30. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  31. TopTop #4787
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Excerpt from Little Gidding


    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.
    Through the unknown, unremembered gate
    When the last of earth left to discover
    Is that which was the beginning;
    At the source of the longest river
    The voice of the hidden waterfall
    And the children in the apple-tree
    Not known, because not looked for
    But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
    Between two waves of the sea.
    Quick now, here, now, always—
    A condition of complete simplicity
    (Costing not less than everything)
    And all shall be well and
    All manner of thing shall be well
    When the tongues of flame are in-folded
    Into the crowned knot of fire
    And the fire and the rose are one.

    - T.S. Eliot
    (The Four Quartets)
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  32. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  33. TopTop #4788
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Rosa, Born During a Pandemic


    On Zoom an infant smiles:
    It was months before we visited you live and three weeks
    more before we could hold you. My granddaughter limitless,
    without aspiration, until (wearing your owl face pajamas) you set
    your mind to crawl, wandering off to explore
    the contours of an abstract dome shaped toy, popup board book
    and rubber giraffe that squeaks. Often you taste
    your toys before your fingers groom their surface.
    Traveling from room to room dangers abound and attract—
    as if you were a 5-foot, 10-inch point guard challenging
    a big man or a second lieutenant contemplating an action
    rather than a cause—wires adhered to walls, water boiling
    on the stove, pointy knobs on draws. Is anything ever known
    before encountered?


    In a photo album an infant smiles:
    My parents proclaimed they’d wake me any time,
    day or night and I’d smile. This was World War Two
    when American Jews sought relief any way they could.
    Dad, are sociological explanations any use coming to terms
    with how fearful and constrained a kid I was? Of course, it’s imagination reconstructing what I know in my guts. Memory unreliable
    before language. If I were permitted to crawl about, allowed
    to explore and run my fingers around the contours of objects
    that might break, we may never have been mutually humiliated
    when I was unable to bait a hook on a fishing line or was late learning
    to tie my shoes. What is the ratio between fear and contentment, numerator inborn— denominator inculcated by those who love you? Yes, it was when I first discovered (in the third grade) that I was
    the fastest runner for my age that I smiled—knowingly.
    How fortunate to grow up human!


    Iphone in hand, I snap a photo of a cormorant,
    wings spread wide, aloft a pole
    left from an abandoned pier:
    Rosa, this is dawn during the pandemic.
    I’d have thought a cormorant
    would dry its wings exclusively
    when a day’s heat approached.
    5:30 AM and already
    I am granted a vision.
    A creature, heart shining in the dark,
    presenting its essence, before diving
    beneath the surface
    of the water in search of fish.
    This morning before the sun has risen,
    the park along the East River is empty,
    the sky orange, cradling a cloud above red as a lobster.
    I (who hardly ever took a photo pre-Covid) capture
    water taxies and barges on the river.
    This is what I do during the pandemic:
    Walk the city, snapping images of everything
    that drifts my way carrying thoughts that ripple
    from scenes into poems.


    - Barry Denny


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  34. Gratitude expressed by:

  35. TopTop #4789
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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


    gather birch bark ash
    mix with dried red rose petals
    sprinkle over earth
    making a dedication
    to wisdom among peoples


    surprise yourself with
    boundless humor a base for
    sweet humility
    weaving fragments of battle
    into Good initiatives


    - Lorene Allen
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  36. Gratitude expressed by:

  37. TopTop #4790
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Eleven Unthinking Seconds


    (Inspired by the Social Dilemma documentary)


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


    For the eleven unthinking seconds that I’m captivated,
    I watch someone use a pencil-like applicator to apply a gray
    smudge of tiny metallic bits to the outer edge of an eyelid.


    A thin arch of long lustrous lashes is carefully positioned,
    and then, like magic, seemingly snaps perfectly into place.
    Truly fascinating. Who knew?


    I stopped watching as soon as I realized what I was doing,
    and I didn’t click on the ad for more information, but no
    matter, I was caught unawares and my fate was sealed.


    While I had only watched for eleven seconds, the algorithm
    probably only needed seven, or maybe even just five.


    Now, the all too familiar and vexing gotcha-targeting
    has begun and the same ad follows me wherever I scroll.


    I’m certain that ads for bio-luminescent lipstick
    and nano particle hairspray are already queued up
    and headed my way.


    As a rule, I try my best not to allow my gaze to linger
    on attractive nuisances such as this one, but I’m afraid
    it happens more often than I’d like.


    Once again, I’ve been cleverly manipulated by those
    potent and unrelenting forces that can expertly hold
    my attention for those few dreaded seconds.


    It seems that my poor defenseless brain stem is just no
    match for the greedy purveyors of these insidious morsels
    of commercial enticement.


    As a consequence, a newly taped note on the edge of my
    computer screen reads; “Magnetic eyelashes? Really?”


    It joins an existing note of admonishment that says;
    “Electronic dog leash? Seriously?”




    - Mark Telles
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  38. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  39. TopTop #4791
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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


    Then the knowing comes: I can open
    to another life that's wide and timeless.


    So I am sometimes like a tree
    rustling over a gravesite
    and making real the dream
    of the one its living roots
    embrace:


    a dream once lost
    among sorrows and songs.




    - Ranier Maria Rilke
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  40. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  41. TopTop #4792
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Solstice 2020


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


    We humans cannot measure the complexity of the
    trigonometry, mystery, poetry of
    axis angles, rotation sequence and power of Sun’s rays
    as we hurtle through space over centuries.


    Our miniscule errors in time have exponentially
    turned into days,
    to say the least.


    Solstice is already here,
    warming quarantined souls
    and outside escapees,
    reassuring us of the coming spring .
    pulling dark bulbed life up through
    live, moist earth.


    It is already here.


    Did you not feel the lingering light last night
    under rising Jupiter and her sisters?


    How could we dark little beings pinpoint such galactic chemistry?


    - Jan Corbett
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  42. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  43. TopTop #4793
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A special birthday blessing for Barry Chertov:


    A Beauty Blessing


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


    As a river flows in ideal sequence
    May your soul discover time in presence.


    As the moon absolves the dark of resistance
    May thought-light console your mind with brightness.


    As the breath of light awakens colour
    May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.


    As spring rain softens the earth with surprise
    May your winter places be kissed by light.


    As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance
    May the grace of change bring you elegance.


    As clay anchors a tree in light and wind
    May your outer life grow from peace within.


    As twilight fills night with bright horizons
    May beauty await you at home beyond.


    - John O'Donohue
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  44. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  45. TopTop #4794
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Oceans


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


    And nothing
    happens!
    Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .


    - Nothing happens?
    Or has everything happened,
    and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?


    - Juan Ramon Jimenez
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  46. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  47. TopTop #4795
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Winter Of Listenings

    No one but me by the fire,
    my hands burning
    red in the palms while
    the night wind carries
    everything away outside.

    All this petty worry
    while the great cloak
    of the sky grows dark
    and intense
    round every living thing.

    All this trying
    to know
    who we are
    and all this
    wanting to know
    exactly
    what we must do.

    What is precious
    inside us does not
    care to be known
    by the mind
    in ways that diminish
    its presence.

    What we strive for
    in perfection
    is not what turns us
    to the lit angel
    we desire.

    What disturbs
    and then nourishes
    has everything
    we need.

    What we hate
    in ourselves
    is what we cannot know
    in ourselves but
    what is true
    to the pattern
    does not need
    to be explained.

    Inside everyone
    is a great shout of joy
    waiting to be born…



    - David Whyte
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  48. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  49. TopTop #4796
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Elegy In Joy




    We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
    or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
    for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
    cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
    all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.


    The word of nourishment passes through the women,
    soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
    white towers, eyes of children:
    saying in time of war What shall we feed?
    I cannot say the end.


    Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
    Not all things are blest, but the
    seeds of all things are blest.
    The blessing is in the seed.


    This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
    Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
    toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
    fierce pure life, the many-living home.
    Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
    new techniques for the healing of the wound,
    and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.


    - Muriel Rukeyser
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  50. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  51. TopTop #4797
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    1914 Truce


    Christmas Eve in the trenches of France, the guns were quiet.
    The dead lay still in No Man’s Land –
    Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank . . .
    The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky.


    Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel, sparkled and winked.
    A boy from Stroud stared at a star
    to meet his mother’s eyesight there.
    An owl swooped on a rat on the glove of a corpse.


    In a copse of trees behind the lines, a lone bird sang.
    A soldier-poet noted it down – a robin holding his winter ground –
    then silence spread and touched each man like a hand.


    Somebody kissed the gold of his ring;
    a few lit pipes;
    most, in their greatcoats, huddled,
    waiting for sleep.
    The liquid mud had hardened at last in the freeze.


    But it was Christmas Eve; believe; belief thrilled the night air,
    where glittering rime on unburied sons
    treasured their stiff hair.
    The sharp, clean, midwinter smell held memory.


    On watch, a rifleman scoured the terrain –
    no sign of life,
    no shadows, shots from snipers, nowt to note or report.
    The frozen, foreign fields were acres of pain.


    Then flickering flames from the other side danced in his eyes,
    as Christmas Trees in their dozens shone, candlelit on the parapets,
    and they started to sing, all down the German lines.


    Men who would drown in mud, be gassed, or shot, or vaporised
    by falling shells, or live to tell, heard for the first time then –
    Stille Nacht. Heilige Nacht. Alles schläft, einsam wacht …


    Cariad, the song was a sudden bridge from man to man;
    a gift to the heart from home,
    or childhood, some place shared …
    When it was done, the British soldiers cheered.


    A Scotsman started to bawl The First Noel
    and all joined in,
    till the Germans stood, seeing
    across the divide,
    the sprawled, mute shapes of those who had died.


    All night, along the Western Front, they sang, the enemies –
    carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems, in German, English, French;
    each battalion choired in its grim trench.


    So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist, to open itself
    and offer the day like a gift
    for Harry, Hugo, Hermann, Henry, Heinz …
    with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs.


    Frohe Weinachten, Tommy! Merry Christmas, Fritz!
    A young Berliner, brandishing schnapps,
    was the first from his ditch to climb.
    A Shropshire lad ran at him like a rhyme.


    Then it was up and over, every man, to shake the hand
    of a foe as a friend,
    or slap his back like a brother would;
    exchanging gifts of biscuits, tea, Maconochie’s stew,


    Tickler’s jam … for cognac, sausages, cigars,
    beer, sauerkraut;
    or chase six hares, who jumped
    from a cabbage-patch, or find a ball
    and make of a battleground a football pitch.


    I showed him a picture of my wife. Ich zeigte ihm
    ein Foto meiner Frau.
    Sie sei schön, sagte er.
    He thought her beautiful, he said.


    They buried the dead then, hacked spades into hard earth
    again and again, till a score of men
    were at rest, identified, blessed.
    Der Herr ist mein Hirt … my shepherd, I shall not want.


    And all that marvellous, festive day and night, they came and went,
    the officers, the rank and file, their fallen comrades side by side
    beneath the makeshift crosses of midwinter graves …


    … beneath the shivering, shy stars
    and the pinned moon
    and the yawn of History;
    the high, bright bullets
    which each man later only aimed at the sky.


    - Carol Ann Duffy






    UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote this poem in remembrance of the soldiers in the German and British trenches in World War 1, who declared a momentary unilateral truce in the slaughter at Christmas 1914, in recognition of what united them as human beings, rather than the war that divided them as killing machines.




    A short film about the event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSa2...ature=youtu.be
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  52. Gratitude expressed by 7 members:

  53. TopTop #4798
    M/M's Avatar
    M/M
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Others who noted that very special day and other times preceding it as well: World War I: The 1914 Christmas Truce

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/world-...-truce/5421076

    Quote In some sectors such fraternizations developed into an almost daily routine. In the area of the town of Pont-à-Mousson French as well as German soldiers started in November 1914 to fetch water daily at the Fountain of Father Hilarion (Fontaine du Père Hilarion), a spring situated in a ravine in the middle of no man’s land. Normally, they took turns to go there, and no shots were fired while water was being collected. But it frequently came to meetings and conversations. That sociability abruptly ended ... on December 7...

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
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  54. Gratitude expressed by:

  55. TopTop #4799
    wisewomn's Avatar
    wisewomn
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    John McCutcheon wrote a song about it:

    https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...DE&FORM=VDQVAP


    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
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  56. Gratitude expressed by:

  57. TopTop #4800
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Winter’s Alcove

    There are sorrowful, chilled fogs these days that remind one of his mortality. We are in that season when the sun loses the eternal tug-of-war with the icy moon, as exhausted leaves fall like wounded soldiers from desperate trees.

    It is the time when the earth falls into her hibernation to conceive the unhappy dreams of lost loves, a time when we are reminded of whom we have offended and forgotten and left behind. It is the time of cold rains and hungry animals.

    Let me kiss you, turn your collar up to the gray cold, take your hand, and strut the joyous walk of love defying the face of the storm. I will make fire and create a dry alcove for you in this river of iced waters, put my arms around your sadness and for one brief and exotic moment take you to where we will lay naked on warm blessed sands, bask in the sun, and laugh at our melancholy.

    Let us heap our fears in the cold night where they will feel at home, polish our joys, and wear them around our necks.

    - Armando Garcia-Dávila
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