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  1. TopTop #4531
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Singularity


    (after Stephen Hawking)


    Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
    we once were?


    so compact nobody
    needed a bed, or food or money —


    nobody hiding in the school bathroom
    or home alone


    pulling open the drawer
    where the pills are kept.


    For every atom belonging to me as good
    Belongs to you. Remember?


    There was no Nature. No
    them. No tests


    to determine if the elephant
    grieves her calf or if


    the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
    oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;


    would that we could wake up to what we were
    — when we were ocean and before that


    to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
    liquid and stars were space and space was not


    at all — nothing


    before we came to believe humans were so important
    before this awful loneliness.


    Can molecules recall it?
    what once was? before anything happened?


    No I, no We, no one. No was
    No verb no noun
    only a tiny tiny dot brimming with


    is is is is is


    All everything home


    - Marie Howe
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  2. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  3. TopTop #4532
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    On the Fifth Day




    On the fifth day
    the scientists who studied the rivers
    were forbidden to speak
    or to study the rivers.


    The scientists who studied the air
    were told not to speak of the air,
    and the ones who worked for the farmers
    were silenced,
    and the ones who worked for the bees.


    Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
    began posting facts.


    The facts were told not to speak
    and were taken away.
    The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.


    Now it was only the rivers
    that spoke of the rivers,
    and only the wind that spoke of its bees,


    while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
    continued to move toward their fruit.


    The silence spoke loudly of silence,
    and the rivers kept speaking
    of rivers, of boulders and air.


    Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
    the untested rivers kept speaking.


    Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
    code writers, machinists, accountants,
    lab techs, cellists kept speaking.


    They spoke, the fifth day,
    of silence.


    - Jane Hirshfield
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  4. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  5. TopTop #4533
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Season of Oxymorons


    In the midst of the pandemic lockdown
    the beautiful spring day sings through the leaves.


    Grateful to taste the cream in the milk,
    I muster the will to let go.


    Socially distant. Together apart.
    The Bunny who lays eggs and the Angel of death.


    Mask of goodwill. Virgin forest tp.
    Wasp nest in my head, picking up the phone.


    I dig into the catacombs of my study,
    read fictions about longevity.


    Wet leaves and dark clouds whisper, summer.
    The virus will rest this summer? Will I?


    The bees keep going back to sleep.
    I put on my armor to grocery shop.


    I haven’t seen the sky this blue in years.
    Is there a vaccine for lack of compassion?


    Everyday uncertainty’s fresh. In a land
    of too much, it’s hard to gauge what’s enough.


    The poppies blink, the old aunties.
    People discover birdsong and Crow.


    Howling with neighbors I haven’t met yet, and dogs—
    the only thing that keeps me sane.


    - Gwynn O’Gara
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  7. TopTop #4534
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quarantine


    In the worst hour of the worst season
    of the worst year of a whole people
    a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
    He was walking — they were both walking — north.


    She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
    He lifted her and put her on his back.
    He walked like that west and west and north.
    Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.


    In the morning they were both found dead.
    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
    But her feet were held against his breastbone.
    The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.


    Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
    There is no place here for the inexact
    praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
    There is only time for this merciless inventory:


    Their death together in the winter of 1847.
    Also what they suffered. How they lived.
    And what there is between a man and woman.
    And in which darkness it can best be proved.


    - Eavan Boland
    ( september 24, 1944 - April 29, 2020)
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  9. TopTop #4535
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quarantine, 1918


    There were towns
    that knew about the flu before
    it arrived; they had time to imagine the germs
    on a stranger’s skirts, to see how death
    could be sealed in an envelope,
    how a fever could bloom in the evening,
    and take a life overnight.
    A few villages, deep in the mountains,
    posted guards on their roads,
    and no one was allowed to come or go,
    not even a grandmother carrying a cake;
    no mail was accepted and all the words
    and packages families sent
    to one another went unopened,
    unanswered. Trains were told
    not to stop, so they glowed for a moment
    before swaying
    towards some other place. The food
    at the corner store never came
    from out of town and no one went
    to see a distant auntie
    or state fair. For awhile, the outside world
    existed in imagination, in memory,
    in books or suitcases, deep in closets.
    There was nothing but the town itself,
    hiding from what was possible,
    and the children cutting dolls
    from paper, their scissors sharp.



    - Faith Shearin
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  10. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  11. TopTop #4536
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Scripture With Your Tea

    I tell you, if you read scripture with your tea, as do I every morning
    then you are I
    in that the rose inside us knows the rose we see and scent
    is the selfsame rose all along.

    Likewise, if your God is the God Of Vengeance what a fool I’d be to deny mine is not the same.

    But, oh, I hope you don’t kill me because of your prayers.
    Plagues make room for everyone so we don’t need to shoulder one another aside.

    But, even in a crowd, we practiced natural decorum, as a baby’s wail is understood as natural in almost any circumstance.

    We need patience now more than ever
    and the volcano of this world practices it
    like the good instruction, the rose of instruction, it is.

    The gamble of the stock market can wait, for the fatal gamble to wander off.

    Each of us has eyes we do not see now.
    And in the meantime and for a while, our heads shrouded in quarantine, imagination is the book
    we read about one another.

    Our seclusion is not a bad thing, but a retreat in a cave from whose door imagination rolls the
    boulder every living moment to a dawn that denies us the coming day of the-same-old-thing.

    Bruce grows still now.
    He knows as know you, and all of us,
    that each of us can do the rest,
    right the rest,
    know the rest.

    Life gave us that.



    - Bruce Moody
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  13. TopTop #4537
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Come as You Are

    Come to the party;
    wear your blanched jeans
    sun-seared to silk
    an arranged marriage of rock and knee.

    Bring your piano hands
    burnished with soil,
    your compost-painted fingernails
    cupping a mug to keep you warm.

    May truth roll from your tongue,
    your breath bear pale green words
    stained with sour grass
    your chin a looking glass for buttercups.

    Bring your perfumed breath
    essence of onion and honest sweat
    simmered in the field of communal toil
    back bent like the winter birch.

    Don't forget your coal-daubed feet
    fresh from the ashes
    stories secreted
    in the knotholes of your toes.

    Bring your hair, dandelion-twined
    spider webs that ride your cuffs
    sow bug and dung beetle
    dreaming in the pocket of your grandma's apron.

    Pack your wind-chiseled heart
    with its needlepoint of scars.
    Don't clean up
    come as you are.

    - Sande Anfang
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  15. TopTop #4538
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Cinco de Mayo


    Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people,

    those whose land is starved of blood,

    civilizations which are no longer

    holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet,

    with our tongues, that dangerous language,

    saying more of this world than the volumes

    of textured and controlled words on a page.

    We are the gentle rage; our hands hold

    the stream of the earth, the flowers

    of dead cities, the green of butterfly wings.

    Cinco de Mayo is about the barefoot, the untooled,

    the warriors of want who took on the greatest army

    Europe ever mustered—and won.

    I once saw a Mexican man stretched across

    an upturned sidewalk

    near Chicago's 18th and Bishop one fifth of May day.

    He brought up a near-empty bottle

    to the withering sky and yelled out a grito

    with the words: ¡Que viva Cinco de Mayo!

    And I knew then what it meant—

    what it meant for barefoot Zapoteca indigenas

    in the Battle of Puebla and what it meant for me

    there on 18th Street among los ancianos,

    the moon-faced children and futureless youth

    dodging the gunfire and careening battered cars,

    and it brought me to that war

    that never ends, the war Cinco de Mayo

    was a battle of, that I keep fighting,

    that we keep bleeding for, that war

    against a servitude that a compa

    on 18th Street knew all about

    as he crawled inside a bottle of the meanest

    Mexican spirits.


    - Luis Rodriguez
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  16. TopTop #4539
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Bound to Words


    Even in isolation
    I am bound to words
    already written
    already spoken
    not negating but
    subtly changing the
    atmosphere we live
    and breathe in

    And do we live and breathe
    the purity of air, the
    breeze and blossoming trees

    that signal spring came
    a month ago and we didn’t
    notice because we were practicing
    social distancing, hoping one day
    to get it right

    They ask, are you lonely
    and I say no, I am not lonely
    but I miss the fulness of the life

    we lived for so many years
    I miss it as if you were still here
    when I went on living

    just as if you would be here
    in this house when I got home

    How could I be lonely when my
    heart is filled with memory
    and promise when those I love
    who never met you but know
    your voice when I read my poems
    to them and I can’t explain
    how it is to have you with me
    here inside these words of isolation



    - fran claggett-holland
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  17. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  18. TopTop #4540
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For The Death Of 100 Whales


    In April, 1954, TIME magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.



    Hung midsea
    Like a boat mid-air
    The liners boiled their pastures:
    The liners of flesh,
    The Arctic steamers
    Brains the size of a teacup
    Mouths the size of a door


    The sleek wolves
    Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
    THE GIANT TADPOLES
    (Meat their algae)
    Lept
    Like sheep or children.
    Shot from the sea's bore.


    Turned and twisted
    (Goya!!)
    Flung blood and sperm.
    Incense.
    Gnashed at their tails and brothers
    Cursed Christ of mammals,
    Snapped at the sun,
    Ran for the Sea's floor.


    Goya! Goya!
    Oh Lawrence
    No angels dance those bridges.
    OH GUN! OH BOW!
    There are no churches in the waves,
    No holiness,
    No passages or crossings
    From the beasts' wet shore.


    Michael McClure
    (Oct. 20, 1932 - May 4, 2020)
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  19. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  20. TopTop #4541
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Raincoat




    When the doctor suggested surgery
    and a brace for all my youngest years,
    my parents scrambled to take me
    to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
    osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
    unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
    and move more in a body unclouded
    by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
    songs to her the whole forty-five minute
    drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
    five minutes back from physical therapy.
    She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
    by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
    because I thought she liked it. I never
    asked her what she gave up to drive me,
    or how her day was before this chore. Today,
    at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
    another spine appointment, singing along
    to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
    and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
    and give it to her young daughter when
    a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
    I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
    raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
    that I never got wet.


    - Ada Limón
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  21. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  22. TopTop #4542
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Dear Mama




    when did we become friends?
    it happened so gradual i didn't notice
    maybe i had to get my run out first
    take a big bite of the honky world and choke on it
    maybe that's what has to happen with some uppity youngsters
    if it happens at all


    and now
    the thought stark and irrevocable
    of being here without you
    shakes me


    beyond love, fear, regret or anger
    into that realm children go
    who want to care for/protect their parents
    as if they could
    and sometimes the lucky ones do


    into the realm of making every moment
    important
    laughing as though laughter wards off death
    each word given
    received like spanish eight


    treasure to bury within
    against that shadow day
    when it will be the only coin i possess
    with which to buy peace of mind


    - Wanda Coleman
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  24. TopTop #4543
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Cave Painting At Font du Gaume


    Of course, even his bones
    are now dust,
    his flowing mane
    taken by the wind,
    those sturdy hooves
    and solid flesh consumed
    and reborn in endless forms.


    Even so, through two hundred centuries
    of darkness and lamplight
    he is still running free
    across that vast savannah of time.


    And the hand that captured,
    in a few spare lines
    on the limestone wall,
    that wild grace,
    sending it down through the years -
    hand of my ancestor,
    hand of our ancestor -
    has long since returned
    to the formless.


    A day will come,
    certainly,
    when all this
    will be gone:
    you and I,
    the painting,
    even the wall,
    carved by ages of
    drip and flow,
    through uplifted memories
    of countless tiny beings
    who spent their short lives
    in that primordial sea.


    And yet this beauty -
    this grace -
    offers itself to us
    in this moment,
    the only time we have.


    - Larry RobinsonName:  download-2.jpg
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  26. TopTop #4544
    Roland Jacopetti's Avatar
    Roland Jacopetti
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Beautiful, Larry! Made my day, as you often do. Roland

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Cave Painting At Font du Gaume...
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  28. TopTop #4545
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Women at the Well


    We are the women at the well;
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    We who draw up the sacred water
    under a red sun
    as a child pulls at our skirts.

    We gather, share stories,
    spill our laments onto the ground
    where they seep to the underworld.

    Weathered hands raise and
    lower the bucket endlessly,
    refreshing dry vessels,
    and, at times, hope.

    We are the courageous
    who dare to work the bucket
    into the earth’s dark places,

    We labor to raise earth’s vein of tears,
    Where we have hidden our sorrows.

    And by doing so,

    Both honor and purify the darkness;

    This I know: we do the holy work.

    - ann masai
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  30. TopTop #4546
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Stare’s Nest By My Window


    The bees build in the crevices
    Of loosening masonry, and there
    The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
    My wall is loosening, honey bees
    Come build in the empty house of the stare.


    We are closed in, and the key is turned
    On our uncertainty; somewhere
    A man is killed, or a house burned,
    Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
    Come build in the empty house of the stare


    A barricade of stone or of wood;
    Some fourteen days of civil war;
    Last night they trundled down the road
    That dead young soldier in his blood:
    Come build in the empty house of the stare.


    We had fed the heart on fantasies,
    The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
    More substance in our enmities
    Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
    Come build in the empty house of the stare.


    - W.B. Yeats
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    Dre, M/M
  32. TopTop #4547
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Black 101


    “How are you afraid of a man
    running away from you?”
    -Toni Morrison


    Fear is a magnetizer.
    It changes the polarity of black bodies.
    Makes them highly attractive to
    bullets, police batons, tasers,
    white rage, white guilt,
    and blue-eyed blondes.


    Fear is a multiplier.
    It turns children into men,
    men and women into monsters,
    and non-compliant teens
    into dangerous gangs
    and threatening mobs.


    Fear is a magician.
    It turns Hip Hop into gangster rap,
    plastic toys into guns,
    cigarillos, cellphones,
    wallets, brazenness,
    and extended index fingers
    into high caliber weapons.


    Fear is a revisionist history class.
    It turns people of color into the
    enslavers, confederate soldiers,
    lynch mobs, klansmen, night riders
    and terrorists.


    Fear is a sniper.
    It takes dead aim, aims to kill,
    kills for sport and pleasure,
    is pleased to take souvenirs,
    and stuffs and mounts its trophies.


    - Frank X Walker
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  33. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  34. TopTop #4548
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Because Of You




    Because of you,
    when I awoke I left my bed earlier than usual.
    There is so much to say hello to and wish a good morning.
    Because of you
    I had cereal, blueberries ,walnuts and a little cream
    that I ate slowly, thoughtfully mindfully.
    Because of you
    I turned off the classical music station
    and listened to what was left of the dawn chorus.
    Because of you
    I have poems pressed between the pages of my heart.
    Because of you
    I signed petitions against climate change, and
    pledges to protect children ,immigrants and the earth.
    Because of you
    I walked through the garden noticing that
    many roses now have put on their dancing shoes,
    those bright luminous petals..
    Because of you
    I felt the dearness of friendship in the beauty around us
    the gratefulness for you and roses and blueberries and this world.
    And I know that you are a part of all the things that I love,
    And I write because of you-
    Because of you.


    - Gail Onion
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  36. TopTop #4549
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    How Much


    Low stream flows, deceptively gentle
    incubate fish eggs, keep them safe,
    while storms would sweep them away
    toward predators downstream.


    Birthing salmon and steelhead, fins flinch,
    shudder in waters too calm for swimming
    to tributaries, their birth canals.


    In the main stem, they dig up
    each other's eggs, lay their own. Animals
    fond of ikura, meaning salmon eggs
    and also how much, quickly feast.


    Sword of storm, sword of calm hangs above.
    How often we celebrate, scoop caviar,
    lives swallowed like casual swords
    cutting through first life.


    Custom of delicate spoons, as if fearing
    fragility of wealth, prone to slip away
    overnight, glistening pearly ounces, as if
    taking less dignifies the taking, as if


    life's thrashings disappear beneath
    glistening dishes of roe, as if
    too much would reveal our gaze
    deciding who survives cycles,
    dying, regenerating.


    Fish ache to fly upstream like birds
    swim through clouds like blooms
    welcome the sun, as fawns bond
    in faint cries to their does.
    Doe and fawn graze, lie on grass,
    each blade holding its own weight.


    - Lynn Axelrod
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  37. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  38. TopTop #4550
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I Ask My Mother to Sing




    She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
    Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
    If my father were alive, he would play
    his accordion and sway like a boat.


    I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
    nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
    the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
    running away in the grass.


    But I love to hear it sung;
    how the waterlilies fill with rain until
    they overturn, spilling water into water,
    then rock back, and fill with more.


    Both women have begun to cry.
    But neither stops her song.


    - Li-Young Lee
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  39. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  40. TopTop #4551
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    To Be Of Use


    The people I love the best
    jump into work head first
    without dallying in the shallows
    and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
    They seem to become natives of that element,
    the black sleek heads of seals
    bouncing like half submerged balls.


    I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
    who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
    who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
    who do what has to be done, again and again.


    I want to be with people who submerge
    in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
    and work in a row and pass the bags along,
    who stand in the line and haul in their places,
    who are not parlor generals and field deserters
    but move in a common rhythm
    when the food must come in or the fire be put out.


    The work of the world is common as mud.
    Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
    But the thing worth doing well done
    has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
    Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
    Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
    but you know they were made to be used.
    The pitcher cries for water to carry
    and a person for work that is real.


    - Marge Piercy
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  41. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  42. TopTop #4552
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    We Wear the Mask


    We wear the mask that grins and lies,
    It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
    This debt we pay to human guile;
    With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
    And mouth with myriad subtleties.


    Why should the world be over-wise,
    In counting all our tears and sighs?
    Nay, let them only see us, while
    We wear the mask.


    We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
    To thee from tortured souls arise.
    We sing, but oh the clay is vile
    Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
    But let the world dream otherwise,
    We wear the mask!


    - Paul Laurence Dunbar
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  44. TopTop #4553
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    This Moment


    At this moment of cruel uncertainty
    Planet Earth seems pretty steady
    In its turning and circling
    Gifting our eyes
    With the illusion of the sun rising
    And later on descending
    During the moment we label
    As 7pm
    When we lift our hands in unison
    And applaud
    The unflinching
    Front line workers.
    In the growing dimness
    Of 8pm
    We even howl in gratitude
    We stretch out our arms
    As if to hold them
    And those they serve
    The ill
    Dying
    Grieving.
    We could also
    If so inclined
    Both embrace and dissolve
    Our collective pain
    By trusting the illusive paradox
    That all exists only
    In the boundless
    Present moment.
    Embodying this riddle
    We can still praise
    Our planet’s comforting
    Consistent motion
    The conjurer
    Of our more familiar notion of time
    Including the returning
    Deceptive rise
    Of lovely healing dawn.


    - A.W. Gerber
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  45. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  46. TopTop #4554
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Kentucky River Junction

    to Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs


    Clumsy at first, fitting together
    the years we have been apart,
    and the ways.

    But as the night
    passed and the day came, the first
    fine morning of April,

    it came clear:
    the world that has tried us
    and showed us its joy

    was our bond
    when we said nothing.
    And we allowed it to be

    with us, the new green
    shining.

    *

    Our lives, half gone,
    stay full of laughter.

    Free-hearted men
    have the world for words.

    Though we have been
    apart, we have been together.

    *

    Trying to sleep, I cannot
    take my mind away.
    The bright day

    shines in my head
    like a coin
    on the bed of a stream.

    *

    You left
    you're welcome.

    - Wendell Berry
    Last edited by Barry; 05-21-2020 at 01:39 PM.
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  47. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  48. TopTop #4555
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In the Time of Pandemic

    It is the time of virus and testing,
    of outbreaks and epicenters,
    time of rates of infection
    and death tolls of loved ones.

    It is the time of face masks
    and closures, of quarantines
    and distance to flatten
    alarming bell curves.

    And it is the time of desperate
    shopping and panicky selling,
    of markets collapsing,
    of gun sales booming.

    Faced with such facts,
    what does our populist leader do
    but stand up to the cameras
    and bully the Press.
    He huffs and he puffs
    and his great balloon brain
    unleashes its forked tongue…
    and still his apologists cheer.

    Oh woe is my country.
    Here sheltered in place,
    armed with no medical knowledge,
    no wealth or position,
    no radio program or newspaper column,
    no podcast or facebook,
    locked down and stymied,
    I mine what little I know:

    That lies come home to roost
    at the door of their maker.
    That the goldfinch of truth
    can be trusted to sing.

    That dear ones we’ve lost
    bequeath us the memory
    of what made them beloved,
    and aspiring to give new life
    to these very qualities is all we have
    now to requite our better angels.


    - Bill Greenwood
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  50. TopTop #4556
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Ashes, Ashes
    All Fall Down


    from 1347-1353
    The Black Plague,
    (Yersinia pestis), claimed one third of the population of Europe.


    Born in a time of darkness,
    she’s laid low in her cedar cradle.
    Buboes flare at pit and groin as
    on her cheeks, false roses bloom.
    A parching fever carries her
    beyond her mother’s grace
    even before the dance
    of rattling bones begins.


    And who’s to blame?
    an aggravated God,
    the sinner, self-proclaimed,
    flaying his flesh with
    with cat-o’-nine tails,
    the sailors dragging pestilence
    ashore in duffel bags,
    the ghetto of immigrants
    rounded up like banished
    books and burned to ashes?
    When no one’s left
    to oversee the barricades,
    nor any left to dig the graves,
    who will be left to blame?

    Blame the Basilisk,
    denizen of the dark ages,
    dealer of death and ruination
    He wears the thorn-face of a rooster,
    strapping thighs of dragon,
    the whip tail of a tortured serpent.
    A foul miasma is his breath;
    a single drop of blood is dose
    enough to poison every well.
    Every field he passes is a
    withering reminder of his
    dreadful domination.

    You dare not
    Dare Not
    look into the
    mirrors of his eyes.
    The sight of your reflection
    will strike you to the ground.


    - b.armstrong


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  51. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  52. TopTop #4557
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    the sonnet-ballad


    Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
    They took my lover's tallness off to war,
    Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
    What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
    He won't be coming back here any more.
    Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
    When he went walking grandly out that door
    That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
    Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
    Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
    Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
    Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
    And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
    Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?


    - Gwendolyn Brooks
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    M/M
  54. TopTop #4558
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Memorial Day for the War Dead




    Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
    the grief of all your losses to their grief,
    even of a woman that has left you. Mix
    sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
    which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
    on one day for easy, convenient memory.


    Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
    in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
    "Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."
    No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
    Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.


    Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
    as a little girl with flowers.
    The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
    for the marching together of the living and the dead.
    Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
    like stepping over broken glass.


    The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
    A dead soldier swims above little heads
    with the swimming movements of the dead,
    with the ancient error the dead have
    about the place of the living water.


    A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
    A shopwindow is decorated with
    dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
    And everything in three languages:
    Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.


    A great and royal animal is dying
    all through the night under the jasmine
    tree with a constant stare at the world.


    A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
    like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
    "Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”


    - Yehuda Amichai
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  55. TopTop #4559
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Concurrence



    Each day's terror, almost
    a form of boredom - madmen
    at the wheel and
    stepping on the gas and
    the brakes no good -
    and each day one,
    sometimes two,morning-glories,
    faultless,blue, blue sometimes
    flecked with magenta, each
    lit from within with
    the first sunlight.


    - Denise Levertov
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  56. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  57. TopTop #4560
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    One


    The mosquito is so small
    it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
    Each leaf, the same.
    And the black ant, hurrying.
    So many lives, so many fortunes!
    Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
    down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
    Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
    before the slug creeps to the feast,
    before the pine needles hustle down
    under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.


    How many, how many, how many
    make up a world!
    And then I think of that old idea: the singular
    and the eternal.
    One cup, in which everything is swirled
    back to the color of the sea and sky.
    Imagine it!


    A shining cup, surely!
    In the moment in which there is no wind
    over your shoulder,
    you stare down into it,
    and there you are,
    your own darling face, your own eyes.
    And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
    touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
    and you know what else!
    How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
    how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
    even your eyes, even your imagination.


    - Mary Oliver
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