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  1. TopTop #1351
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In the Beginning

    Sometimes simplicity rises
    like a blossom of fire
    from the white silk of your own skin.
    You were there in the beginning
    you heard the story, you heard the merciless
    and tender words telling you where you had to go.
    Exile is never easy and the journey
    itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
    when you heard that voice, you had to go.
    You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live
    so close to the live flame of that compassion
    you had to go out in the world and make it your own
    so you could come back with
    that flame in your voice, saying listen...
    this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...
    It is all here, it is all here.


    - David Whyte
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  2. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  3. TopTop #1352
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Fear No More
    Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
    Nor the furious winter's rages,
    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
    Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
    Golden lads and girls all must,
    As chimney sweepers come to dust.


    Fear no more the frown of the great,
    Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
    Care no more to clothe and eat;
    To thee the reed is as the oak:
    The sceptre, learning, physic, must
    All follow this, and come to dust.


    Fear no more the lightning-flash,
    Nor the all-dread thunder-stone;
    Fear not slander, censure rash;
    Thou hast finished joy and moan;
    All lovers young, all lovers must
    Consign to thee, and come to dust.


    No exorciser harm thee!
    Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
    Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
    Nothing ill come near thee!
    Quiet consummation have;
    And renowned be thy grave!


    - William Shakespeare
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  4. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  5. TopTop #1353
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Winged Energy of Delight


    As once the winged energy of delight
    carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
    now beyond your own life build the great
    arch of unimagined bridges.

    Wonders happen if we can succeed
    in passing through the harshest danger;
    but only in a bright and purely granted
    achievement can we realize the wonder.

    To work with Things in the indescribable
    relationship is not too hard for us;
    the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
    and being swept along is not enough.

    Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
    until they span the chasm between two
    contradictions ... For the god
    wants to know himself in you.

    - Rainer Maria Rilke
    (translated by Steven Mitchell)
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  7. TopTop #1354
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Courage

    It is in the small things we see it.
    The child's first step,
    as awesome as an earthquake.
    The first time you rode a bike,
    wallowing up the sidewalk.
    The first spanking when your heart
    went on a journey all alone.
    When they called you crybaby
    or poor or fatty or crazy
    and made you into an alien,
    you drank their acid
    and concealed it.

    Later,
    if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
    you did not do it with a banner,
    you did it with only a hat to
    cover your heart.
    You did not fondle the weakness inside you
    though it was there.
    Your courage was a small coal
    that you kept swallowing.
    If your buddy saved you
    and died himself in so doing,
    then his courage was not courage,
    it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

    Later,
    if you have endured a great despair,
    then you did it alone,
    getting a transfusion from the fire,
    picking the scabs off your heart,
    then wringing it out like a sock.
    Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
    you gave it a back rub
    and then you covered it with a blanket
    and after it had slept a while
    it woke to the wings of the roses
    and was transformed.

    Later,
    when you face old age and its natural conclusion
    your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
    each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
    those you love will live in a fever of love,
    and you'll bargain with the calendar
    and at the last moment
    when death opens the back door
    you'll put on your carpet slippers
    and stride out.

    - Anne Sexton
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  8. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  9. TopTop #1355
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    What If This Road

    What if this road, that has held no surprises
    these many years, decided not to go
    home after all; what if it could turn
    left or right with no more ado
    than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
    were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
    that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
    a new shape from the contours beneath?
    And if it chose to lay itself down
    in a new way; around a blind corner,
    across hills you must climb without knowing
    what's on the other side; who would not hanker
    to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
    a story's end, or where a road will go?

    - Sheenagh Pugh
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  10. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  11. TopTop #1356
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Sirens?


    What exactly did the Sirens sing?
    "Hello boys! Come on back!"?
    We're told it would have meant
    Crashing the ship offshore?


    But, is this true?
    What would the Sirens say?
    "They made so many promises,
    So tied to the mast."?


    Were they expressing
    Their hearts' desires?
    Unimaginable sound?
    A chorus of ocean?


    Probably....
    But, the ship sailed past....


    And everyone loved the sun.
    So warm. So dry....
    Almost time
    To go back underwater?


    - Jon Jackson
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  13. TopTop #1357
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Light Beneath Sleep
    Sometimes, underneath deep sleep
    is a certain diffused glow,
    as, in the rainforest, luminous toadstools
    glow green among the leaf litter
    and beetles crawl about with winking abdomens.
    One night when I followed this glow
    I came to an upturned tree
    that was a kind of cathedral for glowworms
    and the light beat against my face, my chest and my hands.
    At the end of the corridor of sleep, a dream stands.
    It may be that at the end of the corridor of death
    there is the walking slightly uphill
    through the green fields;
    and then the light underneath sleep
    is both in front and behind.
    - John Tarrant
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  15. TopTop #1358
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I will be traveling until August 20 and unable to post the daily poems. I hope that you are all happy, safe and well in the meantime. Many blessings,
    Larry




    What's In The Temple?


    In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
    It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
    The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
    The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow.
    The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
    The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
    If she stands still it will catch up with her.
    Pause with us here a while.
    Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
    Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
    Love will touch you if you are very still.


    If I say the word God, people run away.
    They've been frightened--sat on 'till the spirit cried "uncle."
    Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can't name.
    They know he's out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
    But there is all this stuff in the way.


    I can't talk about God and make any sense,
    And I can't not talk about God and make any sense.
    So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.


    I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
    Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
    And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
    You see there the consequences of carelessness,
    And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
    The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.


    We don't build many temples anymore.
    Maybe we learned that the sacred can't be contained.
    Or maybe it can't be sustained inside a building.
    Buildings crumble.
    It's the spirit that lives on.


    If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
    What would you worship there?
    What would you bring to sacrifice?
    What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?


    Go there now.


    - Tom Barrett
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  16. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  17. TopTop #1359
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Day is Done

    The day is done, and the darkness
    Falls from the wings of Night,
    As a feather is wafted downward
    From an eagle in his flight.

    I see the lights of the village
    Gleam through the rain and the mist,
    And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
    That my soul cannot resist:

    A feeling of sadness and longing,
    That is not akin to pain,
    And resembles sorrow only
    As the mist resembles the rain.

    Come, read to me some poem,
    Some simple and heartfelt lay,
    That shall soothe this restless feeling,
    And banish the thoughts of day.

    Not from the grand old masters,
    Not from the bards sublime,
    Whose distant footsteps echo
    Through the corridors of Time.

    For, like strains of martial music,
    Their mighty thoughts suggest
    Life's endless toil and endeavor;
    And to-night I long for rest.

    Read from some humbler poet,
    Whose songs gushed from his heart,
    As showers from the clouds of summer,
    Or tears from the eyelids start;

    Who, through long days of labor,
    And nights devoid of ease,
    Still heard in his soul the music
    Of wonderful melodies.

    Such songs have power to quiet
    The restless pulse of care,
    And come like the benediction
    That follows after prayer.

    Then read from the treasured volume
    The poem of thy choice,
    And lend to the rhyme of the poet
    The beauty of thy voice.

    And the night shall be filled with music,
    And the cares, that infest the day,
    Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
    And as silently steal away.


    - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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  18. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  19. TopTop #1360
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Astonishment


    Oarlocks knock in the dusk, a rowboat rises
    and settles, surges and slides.
    Under a great eucalyptus,
    a boy and a girl feel around with their feet
    for those small flattish stones so perfect
    for scudding across the water.


    A dog barks from deep in the silence.
    A woodpecker, double-knocking,
    keeps time. I have slept in so many arms.
    Consolation? Probably. But too much
    consolation may leave one inconsolable.


    The water before us has hardly moved
    except in the shallowest breathing places.
    For us back then, to live seemed almost to die.
    One day a darkness fell between her and me.
    When we woke, a hawthorn sprig
    stood in the water glass at our bedside.


    There is a silence in the beginning.
    The life within us grows quiet.
    There is little fear. No matter
    how all this comes out, from now on
    it cannot not exist ever again.
    We liked talking our nights away
    in words close to the natural language,
    which most other animals can still speak.


    The present pushes back the life of regret.
    It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
    will have started sticking itself all over us.
    We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
    poor throwing may mean it didn't matter
    to the makers if their pots cracked.


    On the mountain tonight the full moon
    faces the full sun. Now could be the moment
    when we fall apart or we become whole.
    Our time seems to be up - I think I even hear it stopping.
    Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
    Because that the sort of determined creature we are.
    Before us, our first task is to astonish,
    and then, harder by far, to be astonished.


    - Galway Kinnell
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  20. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  21. TopTop #1361
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Quiet Joy


    I'm standing in a place where I once loved.
    The rain is falling. The rain is my home.


    I think words of longing: a landscape
    out to the very edge of what's possible.


    I remember you waving your hand
    as if wiping mist from the window pane,


    and your face, as if enlarged
    from an old blurred photo.


    Once I committed a terrible wrong
    to myself and others.


    But the world is beautifully made for doing good
    and for resting, like a park bench.


    And late in life I discovered
    a quiet joy
    like a serious disease that's discovered too late:


    just a little time left now for quiet joy.


    - Yehuda Amichai
    (tr. by Chana Bloch)
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  22. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  23. TopTop #1362
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Depths

    When the white fog burns off,
    the abyss of everlasting light
    is revealed. The last cobwebs
    of fog in the
    black firtrees are flakes
    of white ash in the world's hearth.

    Cold of the sea is counterpart
    to this great fire. Plunging
    out of the burning cold of ocean
    we enter an ocean of intense
    noon. Sacred salt
    sparkles on our bodies.

    After mist has wrapped us again
    in fine wool, may the taste of salt
    recall to us the great depths about us.

    - Denise Levertov
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  25. TopTop #1363
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Hope

    It hovers in dark corners
    before the lights are turned on,
    it shakes sleep from its eyes
    and drops from mushroom gills,
    it explodes in the starry heads
    of dandelions turned sages,
    it sticks to the wings of green angels
    that sail from the tops of maples.

    It sprouts in each occluded eye
    of the many-eyed potato,
    it lives in each earthworm segment
    surviving cruelty,
    it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
    it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
    of the child that has just been born.

    It is the singular gift
    we cannot destroy in ourselves,
    the argument that refutes death,
    the genius that invents the future,
    all we know of God.

    It is the serum which makes us swear
    not to betray one another;
    it is in this poem, trying to speak.


    - Lisel Mueller
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  26. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  27. TopTop #1364
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    There Is No Word

    There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
    with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
    that should have been bagged in double layers

    —so that before you are even out the door
    you feel the weight of the jug dragging
    the bag down, stretching the thin

    plastic handles longer and longer
    and you know it’s only a matter of time until
    bottom suddenly splits.

    There is no single, unimpeachable word
    for that vague sensation of something
    moving away from you

    as it exceeds its elastic capacity
    —which is too bad, because that is the word
    I would like to use to describe standing on the street

    chatting with an old friend
    as the awareness grows in me that he is
    no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

    a person with whom I never made the effort—
    until this moment, when as we say goodbye
    I think we share a feeling of relief,

    a recognition that we have reached
    the end of a pretense,
    though to tell the truth

    what I already am thinking about
    is my gratitude for language—
    how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

    how there are some holes it will not cover up;
    how it will move, if not inside, then
    around the circumference of almost anything—

    how, over the years, it has given me
    back all the hours and days, all the
    plodding love and faith, all the

    misunderstandings and secrets
    I have willingly poured into it.
    - Tony Hoagland
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  28. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  29. TopTop #1365
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Forever


    In the Universe of God
    she is a wave on the ocean
    of eternity.
    And I, another wave in the same ocean,
    travel with her
    until the time
    that one of us fades into the salty waters,
    leaving the other behind,
    who will also one day be no more.


    But one bright morning
    we will awaken in each other's arms
    beyond oceans, beyond eternity,
    beyond even she and me,
    and at that time
    we will be
    forever.


    - Greg Kimura
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  30. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  31. TopTop #1366
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Vulnerability of Children


    Lives inside all of us
    Like a small animal heart beat
    The quiver of quickening,
    The womb-bound baby's sensing
    Her possibilities and vulnerabilities.


    On edge, unsure, but sure
    Someone is certain, we guard
    Our ignorance, hide it
    Like buried scat instead of the jewel
    Not knowing is, not knowing or forgetting,
    The blessing of curiosity without contempt.


    The boy bends over the microscope,
    Studies the blossoms in stone,
    The steady beat of a heart aware
    Of the miraculous. In that moment
    Fear of mistakes, knowledge of right
    Or wrong recede and the boy's vulnerability,
    The vulnerability of children blesses him,


    Gifts him with precious perspective,
    The vision of quotidian miracles
    Hidden in the mundane. Blessed
    Wonder, blessed curiosity,
    Blessed vulnerability that opens
    The heart and blesses the mind.


    - Rebecca del Rio
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  33. TopTop #1367
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Those Buckeyes

    Oh, lord, lord, lord, it's terrible!
    As Neruda had his precious socks,
    I have had my exquisite buckeyes.
    And the bowl is nearly empty!

    I'm down to two precious morsels
    that celebrate the perfect mating
    of chocolate and peanut butter.

    They are so beautiful
    in their crystal container,
    inside the refrigerator,
    lording it over the
    pickles and chutney.

    Over time, each bite
    has been a ritual, a sacrament,
    a celebration of gratitude!
    Yes, the miraculous
    caught for a moment
    in my mouth.

    I've never felt worthy
    of their delicious bodies.
    I confess that's painfully true.
    I'm merely mortal after all.

    On that fearsome and dreaded day
    when I gaze upon the empty bowl
    may my sobs and tears be a testament
    that for a few blissful moments
    in this pedestrian world
    I have been blessed
    by the divine.

    I have had buckeyes.
    I have had buckeyes.

    - Doug von Koss
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  35. TopTop #1368
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Place


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


    what for
    not for the fruit


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


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


    with the sun already
    going down


    and the water touching its roots


    in the earth full of the dead
    and the clouds passing


    one by one
    over its leaves


    - W.S. Merwin
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  36. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  37. TopTop #1369
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Divine Proportion

    A biologist from Stockholm
    brought me one year
    a porcelain teacup
    a small perfect thing
    which nests in the hand
    just so, with a belly
    that curves as gracefully
    as a humpback’s fluke
    or a whippoorwill’s breast


    It cracked one day
    don't ask me how
    I don’t recall doing it
    wouldn't admit to it anyway
    I traced with my fingertip
    this new fault line
    on my once perfect cup
    with a chip in the rim
    right where you would sip


    Now it just waits
    in the dark at the back
    of the antique cupboard
    no more to be warmed
    by the boiling kettle
    no longer the one
    I reach for each morning
    to steep my tea
    but my favorite still.

    - Seth H. Truby
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  39. TopTop #1370
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Fuchsia


    That summer in the west I walked sunrise
    to dusk, narrow twisted highways without shoulders,
    low stone walls on both sides. Hedgerows
    of fuchsia hemmed me in, the tropical plant
    now wild, centuries after nobles imported it
    for their gardens. I was unafraid,
    did not cross to the outsides of curves, did not
    look behind me for what might be coming.
    For weeks in counties Kerry and Cork, I walked
    through the red blooms the Irish call
    the Tears of God, blazing from the brush
    like lanterns. Who would have thought
    a warm current touching the shore
    of that stone-cold country could make
    lemon trees, bananas, and palms not just take,
    but thrive? Wild as the jungles they came from,
    where boas flexed around their trunks —
    like my other brushes with miracles,
    the men who love you back, how they come
    to you, gorgeous and invasive, improbable,
    hemming you in. And you walk that road
    blazing, some days not even afraid to die.


    - Katrina Vandenberg
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  41. TopTop #1371
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Poet with His Face in His Hands

    You want to cry aloud for your
    mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
    doesn't need anymore of that sound.

    So if you're going to do it and can't
    stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
    hold it in, at least go by yourself across

    the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
    of rocks and water to the place where
    the falls are flinging out their white sheets

    like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
    jubilation and water fun and you can
    stand there, under it, and roar all you

    want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
    drip with despair all afternoon and still,
    on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

    by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
    puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
    of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

    - Mary Oliver
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  43. TopTop #1372
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Snakes of September


    All summer I heard them
    rustling in the shrubbery,
    outracing me from tier
    to tier in my garden,
    a whisper among the viburnums,
    a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
    a shadow pulsing
    in the barberry thicket.
    Now that the nights are chill
    and the annuals spent,
    I should have thought them gone,
    in a torpor of blood
    slipped to the nether world
    before the sickle frost.
    Not so. In the deceptive balm
    of noon, as if defiant of the curse
    that spoiled another garden,
    these two appear on show
    through a narrow slit
    in the dense green brocade
    of a north-country spruce,
    dangling head-down, entwined
    in a brazen love-knot.
    I put out my hand and stroke
    the fine, dry grit of their skins.
    After all,
    we are partners in this land,
    co-signers of a covenant.
    At my touch the wild
    braid of creation
    trembles.


    - Stanley Kunitz
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  45. TopTop #1373
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved


    Resurrection of the body of the beloved,
    Which is the worldWhich is the poem
    Of the world, the poem of the body.

    Mortal ourselves and filled with awe,
    we gather the scattered limbs
    Of Osiris.
    That he should live again.
    That death not be oblivion.



    When I open the book
    I hear the poets whisper and weep,
    Laugh and lament.

    In a thousand languages
    They say the same thing:
    “We lived. The secret of life
    is love, that casts its wing
    over all suffering, that takes
    in its arms the hurt child,
    that rises green from the fallen seed.”


    Sadness is there, too.
    All the sadness in the world.
    Because the tide ebbs,
    Because wild waves
    Punish the shore
    And the small lives lived there.
    Because the body is scattered.
    Because death is real
    And sometimes death is not
    Even the worst of it.

    If sadness did not run
    Like a river through the Book,
    Why would we go there?
    What would we drink?


    Oh, there’s blood enough, and sap
    From the stalks. Tears, too.
    A raindrop and the dark water
    Of bogs. It’s a rich ink.
    Indelible, invisible
    (hold up the page to the light,
    hold the page near a flame).


    The world comes into the poem.
    The poem comes into the world.
    Reciprocity – it all comes down
    To that.
    As with lovers:
    When it’s right you can’t say
    Who is kissing whom.


    Lighten up, lighten up.
    Let go of the heaviness.
    Was it a poem from the Book
    That so weighed you down?

    Impossible. Less than a feather.
    Less than the seed a milkweed
    Pod releases in the breeze.

    Lifted, it drifts out to settle
    In a field, with all that’s inside it
    Waiting to become
    Root and tendril, to come alive.


    Now the snow is falling
    Even more than an hour ago.
    The pine in the backyard
    Bows with the weight of it.

    Two years ago, my father
    Died. What love we had
    Hidden under misery,
    Weighed down with years
    Of silence.

    And now,
    Maybe the poem can free
    Us, maybe the poem can express
    The love and let the rest
    Slide to the earth as the snow
    Does now, freeing the tree
    Of its burden.


    To be alive: not just the carcass
    But the spark.
    That’s crudely put, but . . .

    If we’re not supposed to dance,
    Why all this music?


    Time to shut up.
    Voltaire said the secret
    Of being boring
    Is to say everything.

    And yet I held
    Back about love
    All those years:
    Talking about death
    Insistently, even
    As I was alive;
    Talking about loss
    As if all was loss,
    As if the world
    Did not return
    Each morning.
    As if the beloved
    Didn’t long for us.

    No wonder I go on
    So. I go on so
    Because of the wonder.



    - Gregory Orr
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  46. Gratitude expressed by:

  47. TopTop #1374
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    And the Stars
    Perhaps you did not know how bright last night,
    Especially above your seaside door,
    Was all the marvelous starlit sky, and wore
    White harmonies of very shining light.
    Perhaps you did not want to seek the sight
    Of that remembered rapture any more.—
    But then at least you must have heard the shore
    Roar with reverberant voices thro’ the night.
    Those stars were lit with longing of my own,
    And the ocean’s moan was full of my own pain.
    Yet doubtless it was well for both of us
    You did not come, but left me there alone.
    I hardly ought to see you much again;
    And stars, we know, are often dangerous.


    - Robinson Jeffers
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  48. Gratitude expressed by:

  49. TopTop #1375
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Gate

    I had no idea that the gate I would step through
    to finally enter this world

    would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
    a little taller than me: a young man

    but grown, himself by then,
    done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

    rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
    and running water.

    This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
    And I’d say, What?

    And he’d say, This -- holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
    And I’d say, What?

    And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

    - Marie Howe
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  50. Gratitude expressed by:

  51. TopTop #1376
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Phantom Limbs

    I've met with the witchdocter,
    read the runic bones
    thrown from an ochre ram's horn,
    the strong smoky dark inviting me to see my future,
    the rattle of snake skin waking me from my trance.

    I've listened to the lions roar their gory debate
    beyond my tent, as they muzzle in the blood of a zebra,
    I've seen the African sun empty her orb
    a river of liquid gold across the bushveld.

    I've watched people running from bullets,
    crisscross, a crazed spider's web spun to nowhere,
    terror chizzled in their faces,
    a barefoot wardance on shattered glass.

    I've lived
    where there stood a white bungalow
    with wrap-around verandah,
    chorus of cicadas laced the night air with etude scaling,
    stereo and mono output,
    calls, the sound of symphony
    while a one-eyed grey monkey picked at ticks
    and a bare-foot girl child was swinging
    in the twisted Chinese guava tree,
    planning her life.


    - Margaret Caminsky-Shapiro
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  52. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  53. TopTop #1377
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For Desire


    Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
    and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
    surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
    or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
    of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
    Give me the lover who yanks open the door
    of his house and presses me to the wall
    in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
    and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
    and begin their delicious diaspora
    through the cities and small towns of my body.
    To hell with the saints, with martyrs
    of my childhood meant to instruct me
    in the power of endurance and faith,
    to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
    swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
    I want this world. I want to walk into
    the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
    like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
    and I want to resist it. I want to go
    staggering and flailing my way
    through the bars and back rooms,
    through the gleaming hotels and weedy
    lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
    where dogs are let off their leashes
    in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
    other and roll together in the grass, I want to
    lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
    it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
    and put on that little black dress and wait
    for you, yes you, to come over here
    and get down on your knees and tell me
    just how fucking good I look


    - Kim Addonizio
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  54. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  55. TopTop #1378
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Weave Has No Limits


    Foolish to fear and obsess
    in this over-night roadhouse
    I call my life. In the wide world
    of the spirit I would forget the self.
    It would be swallowed up into a vast
    abundance. Thought would no longer
    matter. Always threads of possibility
    reach out from us. Where they get lost
    and then knotted is the the place where
    distortion perceives a conditioned world.
    To grasp the essence of a leaf, a cloud,
    a stone, cast an inner light around it. Let
    that fine stitch of the intuitive guide you.
    A clarity then can unfold that pure and
    perfect tapestry inside. Do not try to fasten
    the strands with clumsy hands hot for
    lavish confusion. The weave does not
    need your speculations; it is limitless.
    You must let go of the thread that holds
    onto your desperate story. Only when that
    is abandoned with all its ornaments will the
    untainted design appear, deeper and abiding.


    - Rich Meyers
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  56. Gratitude expressed by:

  57. TopTop #1379
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In Praise of Self-Deprecation

    The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
    Scruples are alien to the black panther.
    Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions
    The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

    The self-critical jackal does not exist.
    The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
    live as they live and are glad of it.

    The killer-whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos
    but in other respects it is light.

    There is nothing more animal-like
    than a clear conscience
    on the third planet of the Sun.

    - Wislawa Szymborska
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  58. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  59. TopTop #1380
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Little Gidding


    I
    Midwinter spring is its own season
    Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
    Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
    When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
    The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
    In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
    Reflecting in a watery mirror
    A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
    And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
    Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
    In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
    The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
    Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
    But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
    Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
    Of snow, a bloom more sudden
    Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
    Not in the scheme of generation.
    Where is the summer, the unimaginable
    Zero summer?
    If you came this way,
    Taking the route you would be likely to take
    From the place you would be likely to come from,
    If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
    White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
    It would be the same at the end of the journey,
    If you came at night like a broken king,
    If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
    It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
    And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
    And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
    Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
    From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
    If at all. Either you had no purpose
    Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
    And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
    Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
    Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
    But this is the nearest, in place and time,
    Now and in England.
    If you came this way,
    Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
    At any time or at any season,
    It would always be the same: you would have to put off
    Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
    Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
    Or carry report. You are here to kneel
    Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
    Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
    Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
    And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
    They can tell you, being dead: the communication
    Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
    Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
    Is England and nowhere. Never and always.


    II
    Ash on and old man's sleeve
    Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
    Dust in the air suspended
    Marks the place where a story ended.
    Dust inbreathed was a house—
    The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
    The death of hope and despair,
    This is the death of air.
    There are flood and drouth
    Over the eyes and in the mouth,
    Dead water and dead sand
    Contending for the upper hand.
    The parched eviscerate soil
    Gapes at the vanity of toil,
    Laughs without mirth.
    This is the death of earth.
    Water and fire succeed
    The town, the pasture and the weed.
    Water and fire deride
    The sacrifice that we denied.
    Water and fire shall rot
    The marred foundations we forgot,
    Of sanctuary and choir.
    This is the death of water and fire.
    In the uncertain hour before the morning
    Near the ending of interminable night
    At the recurrent end of the unending
    After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
    Had passed below the horizon of his homing
    While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
    Over the asphalt where no other sound was
    Between three districts whence the smoke arose
    I met one walking, loitering and hurried
    As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
    Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
    And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
    That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
    The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
    I caught the sudden look of some dead master
    Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
    Both one and many; in the brown baked features
    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
    Both intimate and unidentifiable.
    So I assumed a double part, and cried
    And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
    Although we were not. I was still the same,
    Knowing myself yet being someone other—
    And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
    To compel the recognition they preceded.
    And so, compliant to the common wind,
    Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
    In concord at this intersection time
    Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
    We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
    I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
    Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
    I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
    And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
    My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
    These things have served their purpose: let them be.
    So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
    By others, as I pray you to forgive
    Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
    And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
    For last year's words belong to last year's language
    And next year's words await another voice.
    But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
    To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
    Between two worlds become much like each other,
    So I find words I never thought to speak
    In streets I never thought I should revisit
    When I left my body on a distant shore.
    Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
    To purify the dialect of the tribe
    And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
    Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
    To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
    First, the cold friction of expiring sense
    Without enchantment, offering no promise
    But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
    As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
    Second, the conscious impotence of rage
    At human folly, and the laceration
    Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
    And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
    Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
    Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
    Of things ill done and done to others' harm
    Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
    Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
    From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
    Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
    Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
    The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
    He left me, with a kind of valediction,
    And faded on the blowing of the horn.


    III
    There are three conditions which often look alike
    Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
    Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
    From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
    Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
    Being between two lives—unflowering, between
    The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
    For liberation—not less of love but expanding
    Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
    From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
    Begins as attachment to our own field of action
    And comes to find that action of little importance
    Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
    History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
    The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
    To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
    Sin is Behovely, but
    All shall be well, and
    All manner of thing shall be well.
    If I think, again, of this place,
    And of people, not wholly commendable,
    Of no immediate kin or kindness,
    But of some peculiar genius,
    All touched by a common genius,
    United in the strife which divided them;
    If I think of a king at nightfall,
    Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
    And a few who died forgotten
    In other places, here and abroad,
    And of one who died blind and quiet
    Why should we celebrate
    These dead men more than the dying?
    It is not to ring the bell backward
    Nor is it an incantation
    To summon the spectre of a Rose.
    We cannot revive old factions
    We cannot restore old policies
    Or follow an antique drum.
    These men, and those who opposed them
    And those whom they opposed
    Accept the constitution of silence
    And are folded in a single party.
    Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
    We have taken from the defeated
    What they had to leave us—a symbol:
    A symbol perfected in death.
    And all shall be well and
    All manner of thing shall be well
    By the purification of the motive
    In the ground of our beseeching.


    IV
    The dove descending breaks the air
    With flame of incandescent terror
    Of which the tongues declare
    The one discharge from sin and error.
    The only hope, or else despair
    Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
    To be redeemed from fire by fire.
    Who then devised the torment? Love.
    Love is the unfamiliar Name
    Behind the hands that wove
    The intolerable shirt of flame
    Which human power cannot remove.
    We only live, only suspire
    Consumed by either fire or fire.


    V
    What we call the beginning is often the end
    And to make and end is to make a beginning.
    The end is where we start from. And every phrase
    And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
    Taking its place to support the others,
    The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
    An easy commerce of the old and the new,
    The common word exact without vulgarity,
    The formal word precise but not pedantic,
    The complete consort dancing together)
    Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
    Every poem an epitaph. And any action
    Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
    Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
    We die with the dying:
    See, they depart, and we go with them.
    We are born with the dead:
    See, they return, and bring us with them.
    The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
    Are of equal duration. A people without history
    Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
    Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
    On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
    History is now and England.
    With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
    Calling
    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
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