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  1. TopTop #1411
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  2. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  3. TopTop #1412
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  5. TopTop #1413
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  6. TopTop #1414
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  8. TopTop #1415
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  10. TopTop #1416
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  12. TopTop #1417
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  14. TopTop #1418
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  16. TopTop #1419
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  17. TopTop #1420
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  19. TopTop #1421
    Teirrahmae
    Guest

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    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
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  21. TopTop #1422
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  23. TopTop #1423
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  25. TopTop #1424
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  27. TopTop #1425
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  28. TopTop #1426
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  30. TopTop #1427
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  32. TopTop #1428
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  34. TopTop #1429
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  35. TopTop #1430
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  37. TopTop #1431
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  38. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  39. TopTop #1432
    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.

    - Yahuda Amichai
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  41. TopTop #1433
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  43. TopTop #1434
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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)
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  45. TopTop #1435
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  46. TopTop #1436
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  47. TopTop #1437
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  49. TopTop #1438
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    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  51. TopTop #1439
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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  52. TopTop #1440
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from 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
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