Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Listen to the Dead!

We don’t really listen to the dead
Remind ourselves
Of their longings for us,
Their best wishes
For peace and love,
Friendship!
The wisdom of the cliff riders
Resides within us
But is neglected,
Bypassed.
Empty words
From dead who
Cannot influence by threat
Or lecture
Whose lessons we learned
Or thought we did
And filed
Now Defiled.

We don’t really listen to the dead
For they have passed through That time,
Not Now
And we continue
Believing their conditions
Don’t Apply
To us
Or forgetting
How they pleaded
And strove to pass on--
Fueled by regrets
And unfinished business
Or by Joy and accomplishment--
Methods given
To assist
When they are gone.

Listening to the dead
Would mean
We felt them
In their limitations and
In their glories
Knew them as us
Reveled in our continuities
Hugged their failures
As one and the same as ours
Not better,
Perhaps, a bit different.
If, as they say,
We would ride on their shoulders
However withered or bent,
Lowering our arrogant chins
Holding them in their truths
Of Time, Place, Culture and Person
Would we not be Served by
Listening to the Dead?

- Philip Wolfson

[Larry Robinson]

The Dead


The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.


They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,


which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.


- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Dead List


Black and cold outside, sunrise veiled by storm clouds.
A robin perches high in the oak outside the kitchen window to begin his daily chatter. I say my customary “good morning” to him.


Steam rises from my coffee cup; first sip tastes best.
Always intrigued reading obituaries in the morning paper;
people’s lives reduced to a handful of words.


“I check the dead list,” Tony, my neighbor used to say; he was a World War I veteran, fought for Italy. “My name not on list. Good day today!” Sad when his name finally appeared; I miss him; made me laugh, his irreverence toward the pope; telling me my back spasms were because I wasn’t getting enough; the man in me laughing, the altar boy embarrassed.


Sad when the old die; tragic when they’re young. Saw an infant’s coffin at a funeral once, it was carried by a single pallbearer. Philip, my best friend in the sixth grade died one rainy afternoon. The cave he had been digging collapsed in on him. Next day his desk was empty. Ma showed me his obituary. Young woman widowed last year; her husband killed in the war; she pregnant with their first; named the boy after his father.


Timeless this checking of dead lists, lists from Thermopylae, from Waterloo, Bull Run, Normandy, Da Nang, Baghdad. A mother’s dread realized.


We will not see the coffins bearing America’s colors return home. No day of mourning for them. Each blood sacrifice reduced to an item in the obits.


I consider making another cup of coffee but the kitchen lights flicker as flashes of lightning crack, explode, rumble through the valley shattering the predawn peace. My house trembles, window panes shake. Without mercy rain and hail pound apple trees in the orchard their blossoms fall to the ground, fruit that will never be realized. A vicious wind fells the oak, its roots point toward heaven. I hear nothing more from the robin.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

[Larry Robinson]

What once was


What once was
May not be again…

For as the Cosmic
Shifts occur the
Present influences
Change and ebb
And flow…

In truth, there is never
A static condition….

Yet within all dynamic
Influences
There is a Center…

And from that
Center…

Springs forth
Hope, and
Love, and
Faith, Beloved
One


- Jim Coy

[Larry Robinson]

The Long Boat


When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.


- Stanley Kunitz

[Larry Robinson]

The Cure


Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.


The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.


History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.


So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.


Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky


That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.


Seamus Heaney's translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes


Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.


A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.


Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to us.


- Sheenagh Pugh

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn Equinox


So how is it these two huge masses
so adeptly change their relationship
one to another -
monstrous furnace and its blue slave
tipped ever so slightly to the north
locked together and spinning -
for one day at least east is truly east
west truly west
day and night both one length
until our sun slants
over so many umber meadows
over so many boulder fields -
dance earth
after so many sunflower glories now
shadows of cloud on stone as
two forever wheels spin
birthing a blowing snow
behind dragonfly wind and its
thousand bronzed and irised wings


- Daniel Williams

[Larry Robinson]

Reverse Living


Life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time. All your weekends.
And what do you get at the end of it -
Death - A great reward.
I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first. Get it out of the way.
Then you live 20 years in an old folks home.
You get kicked out when you're too young.
You get a good watch. You go to work.
You work for 40 years until you are young enough to enter college.
You learn to party until you are ready for High School.
You go to High School, Grade School,
You become a little kid.
You play, you have no responsibilities.
You become a little baby.
You go back into the womb.
You spend the last nine months floating
Only to finish off as a gleam in somebodies eye.


- Lynne Vance

[Larry Robinson]

The Fall Almost Nobody Sees


Everybody's gone away.
They think there's nothing left to see.
The garish colors' flashy show is over.
Now those of us who stay
hunker down in sweet silence,
blessed emptiness among


red-orange shadblow
purple-red blueberry
copper-brown beech
gold tamarack, a few
remaining pale yellow
popple leaves,
sedge and fern in shades
from beige to darkening red
to brown to almost black,
and all this in front of, below,
among blue-green spruce and fir
and white pine,


all of it under gray skies,
chill air, all of us waiting
in the somber dank and rain,
waiting here in quiet, chill
November,
waiting for the snow.


- David Budbill

[Teirrahmae]

New to the area (SR) and to WACCO too. I just read your poem and will probably read it again. Look forward to reading more of your poetry in the days ahead. The poetry section was a reminder to me of my husband. I called my husband the "Blue Collar Poet" - he started writing in his 40s and didn't stop until he left this earthly plain in 2008. He wrote at least 10 years of Christmas poems and many others. So now I have a place to share them. Keep writing, it's good for the soul. And of course reading poetry is good for the soul too.

Harriet

[Larry Robinson]

The Time of Dreaming


For Jennifer Berezan and Joan Marler


The year rolls towards darkness.
It is the time of dreaming.
I look for a message in the night sky,
in the temple under the earth,
in stones and in stories.


It comes in the forms of a shooting star,
of the ancient rocks’ embrace,
of a voice in the cave’s fire.


Oh, Dark Mother!
I have resisted you all of my life.
I am afraid of the dark,
hate winter,
refuse to accept death.


I fell in love with the goddess of Spring,
with her flowers and simple joy.
Then she turned into the queen of the dead
and dragged me down into the underworld.
A cruel trick, I think.
Either that or fate.


The voice says:
“You are mine.
You gave yourself to Persephone,
And your heart swells in the presence of black Madonnas
Because they are my manifestations.
I am prior to all.”


I have a Dark Mother who holds me and leads me.
She has promised to walk with me
Through life and into death.
I, who am enamored of the light,
Am welcomed into the darkness.


I will have to reframe my thoughts,
change my ways,
laugh with the tricksters.


It is the time of dreaming,
And I am home.


- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

Black Mother




Breathe.....
Yes, I see you are afraid.
Breathe slow and deep.
Breathe, beautiful one, my child.


I am your mother
Your first and final mother.
Your black mother.
I come between this breath and the next,
a momentous exchange:
I give you my courage...you give me your fear.


I come, not to take you
But to wake you to your own waxing
void, where all creation begins.

I come to hold your face in my hands.
I come to hold your heart in my heart.
I come to hold your fears in my breath.
I come to hold your pain in my teeth.
I come to hold your dreams in my womb.
I come to show you that inside your fear
lies the passage to freedom.


Open your eyes.
See me. See me.
Look deep into me.
Leap into the current of your journey.
Into the whirling black holes:
Into your not knowing.


Breathe
Breathe slow and deep.
Dissolve into me, into you, into all that is.
I love you beyond life, beyond death.




- Fran Carbonaro

[Larry Robinson]

A Brief For The Defense


Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

Happening Apart From What's Happening Around It


There is a vividness to eleven years of love
because it is over. A clarity of Greece now
because I live in Manhattan or New England.
If what is happening is part of what’s going on
around what’s occurring, it is impossible
to know what is truly happening. If love is
part of the passion, part of the fine food
or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not
clear what the love is. When I was walking
in the mountains with the Japanese man and began
to hear the water, he said “What is the sound
of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me.
The stillness I did not notice until the sound
of water falling made apparent the silence I had
been hearing long before. I ask myself what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman’s heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don’t have a name for.

- Jack Gilbert (2/25/25 - 11/12/12

[Larry Robinson]

Odd Blocks


Every Swiss-village
calendar instructs
as to how stone
gather the landscape
around it, how
glacier-scattered
thousand-ton
monuments to
randomness become
fixed points in
finding home.
Order is always
starting over.
And why not
also in the self,
the odd blocks,
all lost and left,
become first facts
toward which later
a little town
looks back


- Kay Ryan

[Larry Robinson]

Suffering


I listen, again, as believers,
one, two, and three, sing songs
of the end of pain, of happiness,
and of generous hearts.
Meanwhile, my own suffering,
so evident and open to sight,
lays on the table between us,
ignored, without response,
undignified, and beneath contempt.
As if the thing itself was
an inconvenience, an interruption
of joy, a nuisance which slows
them from reaching their spiritual goals.
And you ask me why I excuse myself,
leaving the invisible thing
in their midst, and closing
the door, to stroll away,
through the quiet lights of dawn.


- Jon Jackson

[Larry Robinson]

Failing and Flying
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

The Black Swan


Now we know how it was
at Pompeii,
when the volcano
began to rumble
and people looked at each
other in confusion and fear.


Or when the monster wave approached
the shore
of that distant Pacific isle,
and people stopped to gaze in disbelief
and ask one another
what was happening,
no one had ever seen
a wave so big before.


In early Europe, there were
travelers' tales of black swans,
but everyone knew this was a myth,
for swans were never black.
Then one day in Australia, they found
the truth behind the claim,
and people gasped, astonished.


Now a black swan is swimming
into our living rooms,
we are turning our heads,
we stare in disbelief
at this creature formed from
impossibility, this unimaginable darkness.


Which way shall we turn?


- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

Any Morning


Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.


People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.


Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.


Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.


- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Morning Voice


Sometimes
a morning voice
arises to accompany me
throughout the day.


One day
that voice intoned:
Sink
into the warm arms
of the universe.


And then:
Be
the warm arms of
the universe.


I held people differently
all that day,
I held myself
more in
welcome,


breathed in
what became the day
as all a part of
being
held,


and I let go,
as you do,
when at last you find
warm arms to welcome
and take you in.


- Scott O'Brien

[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.

- Yahuda Amichai

[Larry Robinson]

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive
- N. Scott Momaday

[Larry Robinson]

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.


Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing, light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowering spiral grain
in our minds so be it.


Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it.


Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave and aware
in our minds so be it.


Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it.


Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep— he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it.


Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars— and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.
so be it.

- Gary Snyder (after a Mohawk prayer)

[Larry Robinson]

The Turkey's Encore


Memories of the Thanksgiving feast,
Burps of delight,
Piles of bones and crisp flesh.

Final toasts to the cook,
eulogies for the devoured bird,
Hang heavy in the air.

Kitchen culinary soldiers,
Cast their die for the,
Bones of the deceased fowl.

Carcass is stripped bare,
Sent home with lucky bidder,
The dark cold freezer tomb awaits.

In the depths of winter,
rain and sleet on the window pane,
The tomb opens ,
A carcass emerges for an encore.

Left over veggies and rice,
Secret family ingredients and boiling waters,
Revive frozen bones and hidden flesh.

A steaming pot of turkey soup,
Gift for a cold January day,
Feast for the body and soul.


- Tom Meyskens

[Larry Robinson]

All my life I've walked
as if hiding in the wood
I do it well


This morning I realized all
the creatures who've come
to me


Know this hidden walk
just because it is so
human


They wait to watch and see
if this human is also a
being


- Joyce Point

[Larry Robinson]

Accident

After Rumi

I am this self
and one racing beyond it.

The long road ahead
and my shod feet pushing.

Spokes, sprocket, bike seat, brakes,
I am also the car coming fast round the curve.

The whomp of metal on bone
and the long second after.

I am the E.R. doctor jacked on adrenaline
and the finch on the hospital windowsill.

My body akimbo
and the bed beneath.

To myself I say, be.
To the other, own the pain.

I ride a red carpet
around that room.

I am life climbing the curtains
and the hand that closes them.


- David Beckman

[Larry Robinson]

The Hero’s Journey

I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor
of a giant hotel lobby
and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night

and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
down the long air-conditioned corridors
of the Steinberg Building across the street

and emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum
with a special flat-bladed tool
he keeps in his back pocket.

It tempered my enthusiasm for “The Collected Sonnets of Hugh
Pembley-Witherton”
and for Kurt von Heinzelman’s “Epic of the Seekers for the Grail,”

Chapter 5, “The Trial,” in which he describes how the
“tall and fair-complexioned” knight, Gawain,
makes camp one night beside a windblown cemetery

but cannot sleep for all the voices
rising up from underground—

Let him stay out there a hundred nights, the little wonder boy,
With his thin blanket and his cold armor and his
useless sword,

until he understands exactly how
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters.

In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
he will hear his name embroidered into toasts and songs.

But now he knows there is a country he had not accounted for,
and that country has its citizens:

the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 A.M.;

the soldiers fitting every horse in Prague with diapers
before the emperor’s arrival;

and that woman in the nursing home,
who has worked there for a thousand years,

taking away the bedpans,
lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.


- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

​All the Little Hoof-Prints



Farther up the gorge the sea’s voice fainted and ceased.
We heard a new noise far away ahead of us, vague and metallic, it might have been some unpleasant bird’s voice
Bedded in a matrix of long silences. At length we came to a little cabin lost in the redwoods,
An old man sat on a bench before the doorway filing a cross-cut saw; sometimes he slept,
Sometimes he filed. Two or three horses in the corral by the streamside lifted their heads
To watch us pass, but the old man did not.


In the afternoon we returned the same way,
And had the picture in our minds of magnificent regions of space and mountain not seen before. (This was
The first time that we visited Pigeon Gap, whence you look down behind the great shouldering pyramid-
Edges of Pico Blanco through eagle-gulfs of air to a forest basin
Where two-hundred-foot redwoods look like the pile on a Turkish carpet.) With such extensions of the idol-
Worshipping mind we came down the streamside. The old man was still at his post by the cabin doorway, but now
Stood up and stared, said angrily “Where are you camping?” I said “We’re not camping, we’re going home.” He said
From his flushed heavy face, “That’s the way fires get started. Did you come at night?” “We passed you this morning.
You were half asleep, filing a saw.” “I’ll kill anybody that starts a fire here ...” his voice quavered
Into bewilderment ... “I didn’t see you. Kind of feeble I guess.
My temperature’s a hundred and two every afternoon.” “Why, what’s the matter?” He removed his hat
And rather proudly showed us a deep healed trench in the bald skull. “My horse fell at the ford,
I must ’a’ cracked my head on a rock. Well sir I can’t remember anything till next morning.
I woke in bed the pillow was soaked with blood, the horse was in the corral and had had his hay,”—
Singing the words as if he had told the story a hundred times. To whom? To himself, probably,—
“The saddle was on the rack and the bridle on the right nail. What do you think of that now?” He passed
His hand on his bewildered forehead and said, “Unless an angel or something came down and did it.
A basin of blood and water by the crick, I must ’a’ washed myself.” My wife said sharply, “Have you been to a doctor?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “my boy happened down.” She said “You oughtn’t to be alone here: are you all alone here?”
“No;” he answered, “horses. I’ve been all over the world: right here is the most beautiful place in the world.
I played the piccolo in ships’ orchestras.” We looked at the immense redwoods and dark
Fern-taken slip of land by the creek, where the horses were, and the yuccaed hillsides high in the sun
Flaring like torches; I said “Darkness comes early here.” He answered with pride and joy, “Two hundred and eighty-
Five days in the year the sun never gets in here.
Like living under the sea, green all summer, beautiful.” My wife said, “How do you know your temperature’s
A hundred and two?” “Eh? The doctor. He said the bone
Presses my brain, he’s got to cut out a piece. I said All right you’ve got to wait till it rains,
I’ve got to guard my place through the fire-season. By God” he said joyously,
“The quail on my roof wake me up every morning, then I look out the window and a dozen deer
Drift up the canyon with the mist on their shoulders. Look in the dust at your feet, all the little hoof-prints.”


- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN


“Lincoln?—
Well, I was in the old Second Maine,
The first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree State.
Of course I didn’t get the butt of the clip;
We was there for guardin’ Washington—
We was all green.


“I ain’t never ben to the theayter in my life—
I didn’t know how to behave.
I ain’t never ben since.
I can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in
When he was shot.
I can tell you, sir, there was a panic
When we found our President was in the shape he was in!
Never saw a soldier in the world but what liked him.


“Yes, sir. His looks was kind o’ hard to forget.
He was a spare man,
An old farmer.
Everything was all right, you know,
But he wasn’t a smooth-appearin’ man at all—
Not in no ways;
Thin-faced, long-necked,
And a swellin’ kind of a thick lip like.


“And he was a jolly old fellow—always cheerful;
He wasn’t so high but the boys could talk to him their own ways.
While I was servin’ at the Hospital
He’d come in and say, ‘You look nice in here,’
Praise us up, you know.
And he’d bend over and talk to the boys—
And he’d talk so good to ’em—so close—
That’s why I call him a farmer.
I don’t mean that everything about him wasn’t all right, you understand,
It’s just—well, I was a farmer—
And he was my neighbor, anybody’s neighbor.
I guess even you young folks would ‘a’ liked him.”


- Witter Bynner