Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[gardenmaniac]

oi ... please pass the Prozac ...

Tomorrow

I

Tomorrow I will start to be happy....

[Larry Robinson]

A Valley Like This


Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened -
there was nothing, and then...


But maybe sometimes you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?


We have to watch and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don't watch out.


Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party your life is.


- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Psalm for a Lost Summer


By the rivers of Estes Park, there we sat down, yes, we sighed, when we
remembered Italy.
We pressed our pens against paper, and we sat under the pine trees,
listening to the crows.
For there in Colorado we were captive at a high altitude, required
to write without breath; and if we could not write, our consciences
required us to read, and improve our minds.
How shall we write our poems in this strange land?
If I forget you, Venice, let my right hand forget to wind the fettuccini
around the fork.
If I do not remember balmy Sorrento, let me never taste lemons again;
if I prefer not Capri above my chief joy.
Remember, O Muse, the couple who strolled about Assisi; who said,
How lovely this is, but next year let's vacation at home.
O Citizens of Assisi, do not blame us for the earthquake that destroyed
your basilica; how happy we were, looking at your frescos during a
thunderstorm.
Happy we shall be again, when we dash from this rented cabin, and
drive down from these great stone mountains forever, Amen.


- Maura Stanton

[Larry Robinson]

Apples


I used to pick apples as a boy
From the branches of a buddy's tree.
Off the branch and into the mouth,
The flesh was streaked through rosy pink
And sweet and crisp as nothing I knew
Save friendship.
Three or four at once I'd eat,
Run off, play, and come back for more.


In college I'd bike to abandoned orchards
On crisp September mornings.
I'd climb up, my mount leaned against a trunk,
And shake the branches till the leaves rattled
And they'd fall red by dozens
Thumping the wet-golden grass.
Jump down! Pick them up!
Wormy ones and all!
And bike home with a backpack full
-- a big pack, like you'd take hiking for a week.


Those after picking nights I stood over big steamy applesauce pots,
While a pie baked in the oven.
The rare virgins (no worms or bruises) I'd relish
One by one
Over cool days that followed.


These were old apples, musk-flavored like wine,
Coarse fleshed like kale
From trees that outlived their planters by
Fourscore years.
Outlasted their houses, too,


Some trees were rotted, like the houses,
Save for one strip of trunk spiraling up,
And one branch
That would blossom white year after year,
And bear red.
I took these fruits as precious
Joyfully disdaining the wax-shiney imposters
Stacked in neat rows at Safeway


Oh, I celebrated the worms!
They protected my crop!
For them orchard and apples were mine
Tax free, work free -
All I did was climb the tree, and shake
And wake to the smell of applesauce
Lingering in the air
I'll have some for breakfast, with cream.


- Garth Gilchrist

[Larry Robinson]

July, July, July

July, eternal summer,
every child's wish -
no school on either side.
Those belled hours curled up and died
in June.

July, July,
pregnant orchards dripping with fruit,
pools of children splashing in light,
porch swings creaking in weight of hear,
barbecue sauce, grilled burgers, hushed evening voices.

Gracias a dios for all the Julys
and that we were young,
sizzling through life,
golden fields humming
under our feet.

July, timeless july.

- Jan Corbett

[Larry Robinson]

The First Artichoke


Though everyone said no one could grow

artichokes in New Jersey, my father
planted the seeds and they grew one magnificent
artichoke, late-season, long after the squash,
tomatoes, and zucchini.


It was the derelict in my father's garden,
little Buddha of a vegetable, pinecone gone awry.
It was as strange as a bony-plated armadillo.


My mother prepared the artichoke as if preparing
a miracle. She snipped the bronzy winter-kissed tips
mashed breadcrumbs, oregano, parmesan, garlic,
and lemon, stuffed the mush between the leaves,
baked, then placed the artichoke on the table.
This, she said, was food we could eat with our fingers.
The First Artichoke


When I hesitated, my father spoke of beautiful Cynara,
who'd loved her mother more than she'd loved Zeus.
In anger, the god transformed her
into an artichoke. And in 1949 Marilyn Monroe
had been crowned California's first Artichoke Queen.


I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.


Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.


But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.


- Diane Lockward

[gardenmaniac]

Delicious!

thank you for this tasty bit, Larry

The First Artichoke

[Larry Robinson]

The Lightning Tree


In my niece's yard, close to the creek,
a huge sycamore, split wide open,
lives scarred and green, lines of gray
black descend from the sky marking
a history of violence. To live
split open,


To live torn apart by sudden light
you have to be able to allow
all to enter, even confusion, imperfection,
and fear, to walk with weightless joy
without owning it or wishing to.


You have to be willing to slip
sightless, silent into the unknown,
Unknowable fullness–and lack,
willing to clutch and hold
only the knowledge that
all is unknowable.


You must be
willing to stop
naming even yourself.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Things


What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.


We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,


and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.


Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth


so we could pass into safety.


- Lisel Mueller

[ronliskey]

and a ship became 'she'

[Larry Robinson]

Language in the Mouth of the Enemy


I am afraid that this poem
will contribute to the destruction of Israel.
I am afraid that if I visit Adel Handal and his family
in Bethlehem one more time
I am betraying the Jewish state.
If I go to Daher's Vineyard and plant an olive tree,
if I teach the women of Nahalin poetry,
if I give voice to their rage,
what great-aunt of mine shot in the back
before an unmarked grave will have died then,
again for nothing?
If I love the suffering of the Palestinians - it is so bright -
more than the suffering of my own,
if I work for a better life for that dark-eyed boy
in Aida refugee camp who chased after our bus with arms
spread like a hawk's wing-span - who lifted a finger
to save the child in Warsaw, Lodz, Berlin? -
If that boy grows strong and straps a bomb
or worse, writes an article, a play, the perfect
argument against the Jewish state
then what have I done? What have I
done? What have
I done?


- Elana Bell

[Larry Robinson]

Our Aether

Beneficent formless force,
how great the joy in finding you—
if “you” be fitting address.—

Purposeless thought
pervading possible space,
leave us to be what we can be.

Know if you will, what we are,
just as we accept, even embrace,
all of our neighbors seen and unseen.

Show us the light to keep communion
with how this touch like a fragrance enables
invisibly conscious enveloping forces.


- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

In the Cave of Sister Mary Kevin, Ursaline


She might have even been as Spartan as Father Ignatius
if her taste had not run to plastered walls, a few modest chintz prints
and poignant photos of helpless children.
You could have fed a child in Haiti for that price, Sister.


Alok asked me about priest-craft—
appeasing hungry ghosts with big bellies,
tight mouths, and one might presume assholes,
not to mention pussies. Forgive me, Sister.


The anti-dote contains no eyes, no ears, no tongue,
no body, no mind, no assholes
no thought, no perception, no old age, no ending of old age and death
—and no sex. Have to give you that practice, Sister.


I knew more, or at least said, more than I ought.
Phil told me that the rite was no more than slight of hand:
chocolate, cardamom tea, ripe kiwis,
none of it really satisfying or nourishing.


Hungry ghosts think it’s dinner.
Anything looks like dinner when you’re starving.
Big bellies and big ears arise simultaneously –
evidence, your pictures of starving children in the Sudan.
Trick them. Stuff them with dharma.
No ears? I know about greed first hand.


If you’d had just a little more imagination, Sister,
I might have discovered a unicorn in your garden,
a mythical beast. But no. It had to be nasty tigress.
Her bad breath nearly killed me.


But right then and there
I stuck my head into her mouth,
to fulfill the requirement for courage,
no fear, no lipstick, no kisses.
Then I heard a small voice demanding attention –
Don’t be an asshole. Don’t arm your daemons.
No Crusades, no swords,
No preaching, no stones, no death.


And we were saved.
Thank you Sister.


- Ken Ireland

[Larry Robinson]

The History of Red


First
there was some other order of things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest creation.

Then there was black earth,
lake, the face of light on water.
Then the thick forest all around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we still carry
rose up in us
who remember caves with red bison
painted in their own blood,
after their kind.

A wildness
swam inside our mothers,
desire through closed eyes,
a new child
wearing the red, wet mask of birth,
delivered into this land
already wounded,
stolen and burned
beyond reckoning.

Red is this yielding land
turned inside out
by a country of hunters
with iron, flint and fire.
Red is the fear
that turns a knife back
against men, holds it at their throats,
and they cannot see the claw on the handle,
the animal hand
that haunts them
from some place inside their blood.

So that is hunting, birth,
and one kind of death.
Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.
Red was the infinite fruit
of stolen bodies.
The doctors wanted to know
what invented disease
how wounds healed
from inside themselves
how life stands up in skin,
if not by magic.

They divined the red shadows of leeches
that swam in white bowls of water:
they believed stars
in the cup of sky.
They cut the wall of skin
to let
what was bad escape
but they were reading the story of fire
gone out
and that was a science.

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,
knives have as many sides
as the red father of war
who signs his name
in the blood of other men.

And red was the soldier
who crawled
through a ditch
of human blood in order to live.
It was the canal of his deliverance.
It is his son who lives near me.
Red is the thunder in our ears
when we meet.
Love, like creation,
is some other order of things.

Red is the share of fire
I have stolen
from root, hoof, fallen fruit.
And this was hunger.

Red is the human house
I come back to at night
swimming inside the cave of skin
that remembers bison.
In that round nation
of blood
we are all burning,
red, inseparable fires
the living have crawled
and climbed through
in order to live
so nothing will be left
for death at the end.

This life in the fire, I love it.
I want it,
this life.


- Linda Hogan

[Larry Robinson]

Foolish to lament




Foolish to lament the end of summer,
enough of that confused sound of grief
that only pleases the darkness. Listen,
a season's passing is not your oracle or
creation, not your personal farewell. Stop
playing the lover left tearful at the station
choking on inflated, maudlin words.
From the oaks on my street in late
August the leaves are already falling and
a night breeze bends even the thick sunflower
stalks. The garden lilies and roses turn their
wrinkled faces up into a starry sky. Why does
this withdrawal of summer convey sadness?
Isn't this occurrence a chance each year
to empty your heart into full attention to
change.? Get out of that stiffness, that
mental chewing on the sad,old bone that
has no taste for impermanence..
After all, it is not about you; it is the gift of
observing renewal in a way we have no words for.
Be content to enter a doorway into gratitude.
Listen to the murmuring of the rising wind,
the conversations between the trees. Remain
quiet as though you were walking the hushed
halls of a cathedral Leave your endless talk outside.
The world may have grown weary of your noisy
distractions and wants other voices to be heard.
Let go of that unnameable longing for what is always passing.


- Rich Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

Primitive


I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and
honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand the message: I have
pleased you greatly last night. We sit
quietly, side by side, to eat,
the long pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant sauce dripping out,
and glance at each other askance, wordless,
the corners of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along the sill to show
a friend sits with a friend here.


- Sharon Olds

[Larry Robinson]

Two Kinds of Intelligence


There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.


With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.


There is another kind of tablet,
one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.


This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.


- Jellaludin Rumi
(Version by Coleman Barks)

[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]

Sacred Wine


Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.
Hold it like a sacred wine in a golden cup.
The wine may break you and if it does, let it.
To be human is to be broken,
and only from brokenness can
one be healed.
The ancestors say:
the world is full of pain,
and each is allotted a portion.
If you do not carry your share,
then others are forced to carry it for you,
And the suffering you bring to the world is your sin,
But the suffering you bring to yourself will be your hell.
Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.
Hold it there like a sacred wine in a golden cup.


- Greg Kimura

[Larry Robinson]

Ready


How is it that the community waits
allowing the pomegranates to fully ripen?
Each day they hang lower in their tree
another shade added to their
Biblical skin


Eyed - in their fullness
yet left alone as their seductive
callings of crimson, blush and touch
go unplucked, undisturbed


Yet wait we do -
our collective waiting - our Blessings
An act of harmony
Our restraint bows in homage
as we commemorate our unity
for the fruit to reach us


and it does


and it is then,
as ready
as we are

- P. Gregory Guss

[Larry Robinson]

MY SPIRITUAL PATH


I have lit a candle in an ancient cathedral
and felt the power of the thousands of prayers
that were said there.


I have leaned against the trunk
of a thousand year old bay tree
and pulsed with her energy.


I have swum
with the tiny yellow fish
and the large dolphins and heard them sing
to me.


I have looked into the eyes
of my newborn children
and grandchildren
and marveled at the wisdom and innocence
I saw there.


I have nestled in the embrace
of my sweet, sweet lover
and shuddered with delight
at her touch—
almost too much to bear
but bearing it.


I have said goodbye
to my closest friend
as she died
and cried at her leaving me.


I have danced and drummed
chanted and prayed
with the same circle of witchy women
for a dozen years every new moon
and felt the magic we make.


And almost every day
I am filled with great gratitude
to live such a blessed, blessed life.


- Lilith Rogers

[Larry Robinson]

Let Someone Catch You


It’s in the
falling
that we rise
in that fall-on-your-face
SPLAT
that we forget
who we think we should be
and in that emptiness
find our fullness


Don’t get mad at yourself
and leave
for failing to find perfection
as soon as possible
millionaire by thirty
PhD by thirty
saint/martyr by thirty


Let someone catch you
so they can be the hero
if that’s what they need
let yourself fall
if you really want
to save the world


- Lin Marie deVincent

[Larry Robinson]

Envoi
Lazarus woke to the miracle of no longer fearing failure.
He lifted his two sides from the ground as he tried
To speak, one part gathering darkness, one part humming.
When he walked out, he glimpsed a world never tried.
At the crucial point, there is yet more than one way
Of proceeding, but it seldom appears that way.


- Sandra Lim

[Larry Robinson]

In Sepia Often you walked at night, house lights made Nets of their lawns, your shadow Briefly over them. You had been talking about Death, over & over. Often You felt dishonest, though certainly some figure Moved in the dark yards, a parallel Circumstance, keeping pace. By Death, you meant A change of character: He is A step ahead, interlocutor, by whose whisper The future parts like water, Allowing entrance. That was a way of facing it & circumventing it: Death Was the person into whom you stepped. Life, then, Was a series of static events; As: here the child, in sepia, climbs the front steps Dressed for winter. Even the snow Is brown, &, no, he will never enter that house Because each passage, as into A new life, requires his forgetfulness. Often you Would explore these photographs, These memories, in sepia, of another life. Their use was tragic, Evoking a circumstance, the particular fragments Of an always shattered past. Death was process then, a release of nostalgia Leaving you free to change. Perhaps you were wrong; but walking at night Each house got personal. Each Had a father. He was reading a story so hopeless, So starless, we all belonged. - Jon Anderson

[Larry Robinson]

Dark August


So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.


Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.


She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,


she does not come out.
Don't you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly


to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,


so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,


all with not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then


I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you


- Derek Walcott

[Larry Robinson]

To Love the World


You know you love the world
When the scent of pine pitch makes you cry
When the sound of grass in wind
Is as good as heaven
Stream water feels like as a lover’s touch
And going indoors is hard to bear


You know you love the world
When wind through a hillside of cypresses
Sounds like God laughing
And breaking waves upon the shore
is your own pulse, ln your own body
Sounding on.


You know you love the world
When a swift, streaking overhead,
Carries you out into open space
And granite in your hand
Silently teaches you
The most ancient of religions


- Garth Gilchrist

[sandoak]

Wow, Larry.
Don't I wish I'd written this myself!

To Love the World

[Larry Robinson]

The Kookaburras

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them
no, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Justice


Clutching a white cloth in her hand
She could no longer carry the weight
Of much more than one lifetime
In her diminutive black body
Struggling to stay erect upon
The hard wooden chair next to her son.


Her face wet with weeping
At the thought of his violating
So many young white women
Whom he believed he could
Have in no other way.


Even his slick defense, she knew
Would not save him from
Facing the consequences:
The voices of unexamined hatred
When they finally won out
Thrusting him toward
His own enactment of justice.

How could this be her son
His face now glazed over
And numbed into vacancy.
She was holding it all for him
And felt she might explode
Into so many pieces of a life undone.


She thought of the other mothers
The ones she had seen on TV
Oscar’s mother; Trayvon’s mother.....
How they somehow managed to appear strong
Would it be easier to bear, she wondered,
If he were the victim, not the perpetraor?


She looked through wet eyes
At the young woman on the stand
And the young woman looked back
In a second all lines blurred
Between such delinations.


There Justitia
Dropped her blindfold, her sword
Piercing the hearts of both women.
The courtroom dropped away
The scales hung in perfect balance.


- Fran Carbonaro

[Larry Robinson]

Late Fragment


And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver