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  1. TopTop #1591
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Taking the Dogs to the Beach

    Took my dogs to the beach today -the old lady Sara and
    the young upstart Emmy.

    Sara, a lab mix, used to live to go places but is now mostly confined to the yard; she was very excited!

    Nevertheless, I had to lift all 95lbs of her
    into the back of my Prius.

    Emmy, my sharp and alert 68 pound Sheppard
    practically jumped over us to fit in as well.

    They smelled the beach miles before we arrived.
    The car fogged up with dog breath.

    Out like we came in, old lady Sara huffing and puffing
    before we got 10 feet from the car, Emmy already annoyed at the slow pace.

    30 yards from where we started, Sara lies down near the lapping shore of the sea. Her eyes and her memory were much bigger than her arthritic body could manage. No frolicking in the surf, no chasing of balls sticks, birds or sea foam.

    This was it.

    She could go no further. She lay panting in the sand, staring out to sea.

    Emmy wined and pulled on the leash saying without any words: “come on let’s go!”

    I wonder what she sees, my old friend, in the rhythmic pounding of the surf, the eternal grinding down of things.

    Does she know?

    Perhaps…

    All that lives must die,

    all things flow back to the sea from which they came.

    The best we can do is remember the good things
    and not be afraid.

    For God will not leave us comfortless.


    - George Gittleman
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  3. TopTop #1592
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    O Sweet Spontaneous


    O sweet spontaneous
    earth how often have
    the
    doting


    fingers of
    prurient philosophers pinched
    and
    poked


    thee,
    has the naughty thumb
    of science prodded
    thy


    beauty .how
    often have religions taken
    thee upon their scraggy knees
    squeezing and


    buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
    gods
    (but
    true


    to the incomparable
    couch of death thy
    rhythmic
    lover


    thou answerest




    them only with


    spring)


    - e.e. cummings
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  5. TopTop #1593
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Until We Rise


    They stood, teetering, on the window sills,
    97 stories or 100 stories high,
    and then, looking back
    into the smoke and flames,
    they held hands and jumped
    hurling
    spinning
    careening
    tumbling
    through miles of open air
    until they landed here,
    in our hearts, where we
    dig through the rubble
    of our lives
    to find them
    and reach in, taking their hands in ours,
    until we rise with them
    from the Land of the Dead
    into the new life we promise to become.


    - Pesha Joyce Gertler
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  7. TopTop #1594
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Shirt


    The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
    The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
    Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians


    Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
    Or talking money or politics while one fitted
    This armpiece with its overseam to the band


    Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
    The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
    The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze


    At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
    One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
    On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—


    The witness in a building across the street
    Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
    Up to the windowsill, then held her out


    Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
    And then another. As if he were helping them up
    To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.


    A third before he dropped her put her arms
    Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
    Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once


    He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
    And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
    Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—


    Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
    Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
    Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked


    Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
    Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
    Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans


    Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
    To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
    By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,


    Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
    To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
    Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,


    The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
    Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
    As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:


    George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
    Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
    And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit


    And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
    Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
    Down to the buttons of simulated bone,


    The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
    Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
    The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


    - Robert Pinsky
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  9. TopTop #1595
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Sonnets To Orpheus
    Part Two, XII


    Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
    Where everything shines as it disappears.
    The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much.
    as the curve of the body as it turns away.


    What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
    Is it safer to be gray and numb?
    What turns hard becomes rigid
    and is easily shattered.


    Pour yourself like a fountain.
    Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
    finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.


    Every happiness is the child of a separation
    it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
    becoming a laurel,
    dares you to become the wind.


    - Rainer Marie Rilke
    (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
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  11. TopTop #1596
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Milk Bone
    only crumbs in my pocket
    we walk slowly


    smells no longer interest you
    your world reduced to me


    I am your religion
    I will betray you
    we walk the edge together
    we will both fall far


    - Les Bernstein
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  12. TopTop #1597
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Debtors


    They used to say we're living on borrowed
    time but even when young I wondered
    who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
    died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
    his four sons gathered, his papery hand
    grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
    Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
    while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
    for this indisputable gift of existence.
    Of course time is running out. It always
    has been a creek heading east, the freight
    of water with its surprising heaviness
    following the slant of the land, its destiny.
    What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
    Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
    birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
    and all living things borrowing time.
    Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

    - Jim Harrison
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  14. TopTop #1598
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space



    May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss

    May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away

    May you integrate the wisdoms of your passage

    May you feel the sacred burden of your own life in your arms

    May you treat yourself with exquisite kindness and patience

    May you find peace in your cocoon . . . acceptance and surrender

    May you be transformed by your own darkness and rise renewed


    • Kay Crista
    Last edited by Barry; 04-30-2013 at 01:41 PM.
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  16. TopTop #1599
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Gravity of Stars


    Discovered while staring at the bottom of a coffee-cup
    that I’ve spent too much time looking-up.
    That if your head is arched too high in the clouds
    you can’t appreciate how much you have grown
    once you have forgotten the ground.
    I want to forget about stars.
    About things that fly.
    Skyscrapers.
    Superheroes.
    And God.
    I want to find magnitude in a molehill,
    hard work on an ant’s back,
    bad choice in an empty bottle,
    forgiveness in a person’s car wreck.
    I want to see color the same way a blind man must feel it.
    Tell me when it was when I forgot about simplicity.
    When I started to believe that someone who could do trigonometry in their
    head mattered more than a 33-year-old man who finally woke up this
    morning
    and decided he was done wasting his life.
    Today, he was gonna figure out to be better at living again.
    We need to remember to go up to every person we see with scars
    shake their hand and say,
    Congratulations for surviving whatever it was
    that caused you to hurt yourself.
    Stop wishing on stars and start believing in ourselves again
    for this world is a ticking time bomb;
    everyday that passes is just another moment less.
    I want to see my reflection in an eye of a fly.
    No more stargazing.
    Waterfall wishing.
    Prayer giving.
    I’m starting to get a crook in my neck by starring in the clouds for too long.
    I want to be inspired by heartbeats again.
    Hold people like my favorite book,
    kiss the fat pimple on a teenager’s forehead and say,
    I hope you don’t think that is a factor in how beautiful you are,
    ‘Cuz it is not.
    Tell Michael Ray Stevens
    It doesn’t make you bad to be in love with a boy—
    love is what makes us human.
    Be happy that you feel something for someone—
    you’d be surprised how difficult that is for some.
    I want to tell pilots to try swimming.
    That the sky is way too beautiful for us to be in it.
    We need to come down from our high-horse.
    Tomorrow I’m going to travel Austin, TX by crawling on my knees
    in hopes that when I stand back up I’ll see things differently.
    I’m done dreaming of astronauts.
    The moon is a made-up romantic.
    Put me in the pavement.
    Lie my carcass in the cracks.
    Let me be humbled by the power of speaking by the silent dance
    of a deaf man’s hands.
    I want to watch closely the lips of a mute
    who wishes for nothing other than to hear the sound of his voice.
    Visit a hospital and hold the hand of a woman in a comma dreaming
    about moving again.
    For the sky has nothing in it as interesting as the diversity on this earth.
    That is why I don’t care anymore about flying.
    There is a reason the stars keep falling.
    They are jealous of the things we get to see
    by just being here—
    On
    the
    ground. . .. .


    - Lacey Roop
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  18. TopTop #1600
    Dorothy Friberg's Avatar
    Dorothy Friberg
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Another beautiful start to another beautiful day. Thanks, Larry

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Gravity of Stars
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  20. TopTop #1601
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    In the Storm


    Some black ducks
    were shrugged up
    on the shore.
    It was snowing


    hard, from the east,
    and the sea
    was in disorder.
    Then some sanderlings,


    five inches long
    with beaks like wire,
    flew in,
    snowflakes on their backs,


    and settled
    in a row
    behind the ducks --
    whose backs were also


    covered with snow --
    so close
    they were all but touching,
    they were all but under


    the roof of the duck's tails,
    so the wind, pretty much,
    blew over them.
    They stayed that way, motionless,


    for maybe an hour,
    then the sanderlings,
    each a handful of feathers,
    shifted, and were blown away


    out over the water
    which was still raging.
    But, somehow,
    they came back


    and again the ducks,
    like a feathered hedge,
    let them
    crouch there, and live.


    If someone you didn't know
    told you this,
    as I am telling you this,
    would you believe it?


    Belief isn't always easy.
    But this much I have learned --
    if not enough else --
    to live with my eyes open.


    I know what everyone wants
    is a miracle.
    This wasn't a miracle.
    Unless, of course, kindness --


    as now and again
    some rare person has suggested --
    is a miracle.
    As surely it is.


    - Mary Oliver
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  22. TopTop #1602
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Break The Mirror
    In the morning
    After taking cold shower
    —–what a mistake—–
    I look at the mirror.
    There, a funny guy,
    Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
    —–what a pity—–
    Poor, dirty, old man!
    He is not me, absolutely not.
    Land and life
    Fishing in the ocean
    Sleeping in the desert with stars
    Building a shelter in the mountains
    Farming the ancient way
    Singing with coyotes
    Singing against nuclear war–
    I’ll never be tired of life.
    Now I’m seventeen years old,
    Very charming young man.
    I sit down quietly in lotus position,
    Meditating, meditating for nothing.
    Suddenly a voice comes to me:
    “To stay young,
    To save the world,
    Break the mirror.”


    - Nanao Sakaki
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  24. TopTop #1603
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    What They Did To Sitting Bull


    Lured into the fort by promise
    of meat for his people, they meant to
    murder him for the Ghost Dance
    and because he was a power they
    could not understand or tame,
    sho they did.
    Murder him.
    They shot and shot him until
    he fell in the snow like a sack
    of wet corn meal and the blood
    ran out of him like the cry
    of a lone Crow in an empty sky.


    Then they quartered the body,
    hacked it into 4 pieces
    with an axe,
    thinking this would keep him
    from coming back and put an end
    to his power.
    Because they had not understanding,
    they could not know
    it increased his power 4 times,
    sent him in the 4 directions and
    opened 4 doors into the the starry worlds.
    You can fool a straving dog with
    the promise of meat, but
    a man of real power will
    eat your heart and relish
    every lie and frail conceit;
    he will feast on your weakness
    and for every one you kill,
    4 will come seeking your unborn children
    and they will carve them from your loins and
    they will carry them away
    and feed them in the empty sky
    for the meat which was promised him.


    - Red Hawk
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  26. TopTop #1604

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Thank you for posting this poem by Red Hawk. I'm especially happy to see it today. Just after midnight I finished editing the chapter on Sitting Bull in my book, Twenty-six Companions (available mid-June). I have met him in one of the four directions he was sent.

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    What They Did To Sitting Bull

    Lured into the fort by promise
    of meat for his people, they meant to
    murder him for the Ghost Dance...
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  27. TopTop #1605
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Frank Givens Encountering Crazy Horse

    When Frank Givens first wondered
    how many souls he himself possessed,
    where each one resided and who else,
    pondering the same things, was
    ahead or behind him in this exploration,
    Frank Givens accepted the notion that
    he might, just perhaps, be just a little
    crazy as in “crazed” as Crazy Horse
    or any other commonly accepted
    hot house shaman or witch doctor,
    all of which goes to prove that
    accepting anything stops creation cold,
    leaving its tracks frozen as fossil
    embedded in those proverbial sands of time
    where footsteps either vanish or
    immortalize like chevrons on sleeves
    worn by Christian soldiers onward
    in futile battles fought for no purpose
    other than the preachments of late night
    downtown British soap operas crying,
    laughing, entertaining as if seriousness
    of purpose solely seeks to sadden
    such viewers who judge themselves above
    Letterman, Leno, Night Live, or Kimmel.

    However, let us go back with Frank Givens
    to just what Crazy Horse is all about,
    horse disturbed by the American armies,
    first of hunterous madmen slaughtering
    tatanka on the plains removing
    life in the form of food, buffalo food.
    “Before I go crazy,” horse musing,
    “First I must try and try to understand,
    just what I am missing about by what
    authority, by what Jesus, these hunters
    simply (Horse-Now-Crazy discovering irony)
    presume all right to the food of my
    people, these herds which diminish


    before the onslaught of long guns
    fired from their smoking iron beasts.
    By what right? And so, I break
    from any sense of reality, justice,
    or Sioux civility and, instead,
    become bitter weed, ferocious steed,
    invisible soul of all my people,
    raining carnage upon the barbaric
    infidel, the crusading hateful killer
    of all that we know to be sacred, I the
    forever wronged and enraged, Crazy Horse.”


    - Ed Coletti
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  29. TopTop #1606
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Dead Woman

    If suddenly you do not exist,
    if suddenly you no longer live,
    I shall live on.


    I do not dare,
    I do not dare to write it,
    if you die.


    I shall live on.


    For where a man has no voice,
    there, my voice.


    Where blacks are beaten,
    I cannot be dead.
    When my brothers go to prison
    I shall go with them.


    When victory,
    not my victory,
    but the great victory comes,
    even though I am mute I must speak;
    I shall see it come even
    though I am blind.


    No, forgive me.
    If you no longer live,
    if you, beloved, my love,
    if you have died,
    all the leaves will fall in my breast,
    it will rain on my soul night and day,
    the snow will burn my heart,
    I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
    my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
    I shall stay alive,
    because above all things
    you wanted me indomitable,
    and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
    but all mankind.

    - Pablo Neruda
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  31. TopTop #1607
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    First Night


    The chapel holds
    many truths
    Christ on the wall
    Surrounded by stations
    Rose-red crackled glass
    Setting the last
    Hot May Day rays
    To the west


    Resting
    Peaceful
    Not crucified
    Buddha
    Praying-hand mudra


    Medipraying
    Medipraying


    Common ground found
    Amid cubicled kneelers,


    Alters and offerings
    Flowers and incense
    Not so different
    Buddha and Christ


    Common mind Blind
    Deaf and blind
    No ears, no eyes
    No knowing
    No difference


    Medipraying
    Medipraying




    Prayatating
    Prayatating


    Fitting so nicely
    Together


    Supporting
    Supporting
    This little piece of peace




    Angela's white walls
    Dorothy's brown
    The new
    The old
    The dogs still click and
    The clocks still bark


    But the Silence


    Remains


    The same


    - Connie Ayers
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  33. TopTop #1608
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Monet's Garden


    I long in Spring to go again

    where the Epte weds the Seine,
    to see the glories of Giverny
    born on Monet's palette, willowy
    brushed nymphea fronds, the
    lilies open to the new day's dawn.


    We saw it flamboyant May
    as all about the gardens lay
    the colors that seduced his brush
    that muse and canvas matched and meshed
    to create in this private heaven
    the promise of his soaring passion.


    Yes, we shall return tomorrow
    seek him out in winter's shadow,
    ask to borrow from his cache
    of wildest color and request
    he give the seeds we'll take with care,
    to plant our own Giverny here.


    Giverny, France


    - Maxine Collin Williams
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  35. TopTop #1609
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Listening to My Mother


    My mother says the author
    has a musky intelligence. Musky
    because you can smell the forest
    shoaled with the secrets of earth,
    roots, hooved beasts nosing the ground
    alert animal, breathing and listening.

    I know what she means. Still
    it startles me to hear her say it, as if
    she were myself, the same
    erotic attachment of body
    to body. Rivers in us, storms
    and spinning stars. All parts,
    all scents and shiftings, shades
    of salt and fragrant blossoming,
    blood and the grit of the soil
    of memory. She says

    the sound of stones turning
    underwater is a kind of music.
    Resonant, I answer. We are quiet
    then, remembering together
    our separate lives.

    Perhaps she heard the stones turn
    like that before I was born,
    standing at the water’s edge,
    her ear tuned to the dense energies
    of the wordless world. Perhaps
    she turned her body underwater
    like a slick fish, and heard the stones
    as I have heard them roll
    downstream in the current that
    shoved against her, that musk
    of presence the angels envy us
    in their disembodied glory.

    Once I turned like those stones
    humming in her belly, in that original
    watery world. I weighed her down
    with the musk of my presence.
    Heavily she turned in her sleep,
    dreaming of water, dreaming
    herself a turning stone, dreaming
    the weightless resonance
    of her own life. I listen,

    the sound moves out from turning
    stones through water, not fast as light,
    but slow as a fetus turning. Not
    like church bells, but like china
    become bone, the resonance
    of ancestors. Her voice and my voice
    the same musky history
    of generations, our lives together

    turning like the radio rosary hour,
    like small stones murmuring
    in the same stream. Sometimes
    I hear my own voice, see my own
    face, a mirror dance, the long line
    of women a ribbon running
    in an Irish knot, origin and end
    the same mystery. My mother says

    and I listen. Stones underwater
    and the rich world turning through
    us, in us, a musky music, raw
    with the wild we love.


    - Elizabeth Herron
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  37. TopTop #1610
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Walking Meditation

    My elderly mother
    takes my arm,
    leaning on me
    for support
    as we head uphill
    toward home.

    She moves
    very, very slowly,
    and I find
    I must focus
    and breathe
    for balance,
    her every step
    becoming mine.



    - Iain Macdonald
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  39. TopTop #1611
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Don’t Tell Anyone


    We had been married for six or seven years
    when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
    that she screams underwater when she swims—


    that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
    into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
    where she does laps every other day.


    Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
    concealing anything,
    not as if I should consider myself


    personally the cause of her screaming,
    nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
    right that minute on the kitchen table,


    —casually, she told me,
    and I could see her turn her square face up
    to take a gulp of oxygen,


    then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
    For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
    as they go through life, silently,


    politely keeping the big secret
    that it is not all fun
    to be ripped by the crooked beak


    of something called psychology,
    to be dipped down
    again and again into time;


    that the truest, most intimate
    pleasure you can sometimes find
    is the wet kiss


    of your own pain.
    There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps
    back and forth in the community pool;


    —what discipline she has!
    Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
    that will never be read by anyone.


    - Tony Hoagland
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  40. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  41. TopTop #1612
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Earth is a Being Who Deserves to be Loved


    Wounded with bombs and highways, the Earth coughs, bleeds,
    and warns, and is not heard nor heeded.


    And still she loves, her tremendous heart
    expanding, contracting in awesome measure.


    After the magical thrust through root and bark
    of blood-streams of seas and thunderous rivers,


    magnificently various, she offers
    the sacrifice of elegance, in flowers.


    Multiple is she in anger and reverence,
    passion and prayer. Even in catastrophe


    and tempest, confounding harmonies enlighten.
    She is haloed with many balancing haloes,


    each day crowned with a corona of caroling
    as bird-note meets bird-note at dawn moving westward.


    Warmed, made fertile and lucent by her Sun,
    laved by her rains, loved by her delicate snows,


    I see her sleeping dreaming, waking,
    streaming rays from glorious eyes, of blue light;


    measuring the secret of us all in a mighty
    splendid montage, she is hermaphrodite.


    Let the palm of our love caress the line
    of her multiform breasts; the hips of her hills;


    embrace her tree barks, mightier than books;
    lie in her arms. She will give us golden bread, and wine.


    - Daisy Aldan
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  42. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  43. TopTop #1613
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Moving Into Language

    We walk
    on the bones of our mother,
    shape earth silence
    into elegy,
    mourn the lost words that
    lie with her,
    searching
    for our own lost song.


    - Fran Glaggett
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  44. TopTop #1614
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Island


    Every visit, my mother-in-law Ruth
    sang us under the table.
    A few hours of old standards
    and Barbara and I would duck out,
    ready for bed, knowing
    her mom could go on all night.


    This time, she’d had a health crisis
    and was recovering in assisted care.
    Our visits consisted of watching her O-T and P-T,
    arranging her transition back home
    and talking with doctors, therapists, family.
    No time for music. She hadn’t even
    seemed strong enough, at first.


    Coming back from a museum-visit break
    my last afternoon, I impulsively
    pulled the guitar from the trunk,
    then found mom and daughter
    in the lounge room, finishing
    a discussion of foods
    needed at home.


    We started with the songs
    I knew by heart, easier
    for eye contact:
    “Blue Moon”, “Begin the Beguine,
    “Sentimental Journey.” I opened
    the songbook for “Love Is Here To Stay.”


    An hour in that vein, until we
    remembered some errands we had to do
    before dark, and promised to return
    before visiting hours ended at 8.


    She was asleep at 7:15. We didn’t know
    what to do, surrounded as she was
    by two roommates, each only
    a hospital curtain away.


    One on each side of the bed, we looked
    at each other and took
    a chance, singing softly:
    “I’ll be seeing you…”


    Ruth’s eyes opened.
    She looked as if she might
    think this a pleasant dream.
    Dream or not, she joined in.


    The songs became simpler,
    more elemental. Too cramped to open
    the book, I had to rely on suggestions:


    “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
    “Danny Boy.” “Old Man River”.
    Finally “Auld Lang Syne,”


    and why I’m writing this
    is to try to tell you
    what is impossible to verbalize--


    how when we sang,
    “We’ll drink a cup of Kindness yet”,
    the cup was really there,
    and it was full,


    as if, song by song,
    distraction and worry had been
    rivers flowing away,
    leaving us dry on an island
    that had been submerged,
    and the name of that island
    was the Heart.


    In this place,
    words did not
    merely suggest,
    they embodied:
    How long since I’d been here?


    Ruth motioned for me to bend
    a little closer. When I did,
    she said, “Music is the greatest gift
    you can give someone in life.”


    The silence in the room
    was breathing this truth, and I didn’t
    want to just leave it all there.
    Maybe this will help me,
    and you, to remember.


    - Max Reif
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  45. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  46. TopTop #1615
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Stepping Westward

    What is green in me
    darkens, muscadine.
    If woman is inconstant,
    good, I am faithful to
    ebb and flow, I fall
    in season and now
    is a time of ripening.
    If her part
    is to be true,
    a north star,
    good, I hold steady
    in the black sky
    and vanish by day,
    yet burn there
    in blue or above
    quilts of cloud.
    There is no savor
    more sweet, more salt
    than to be glad to be
    what, woman,
    and who, myself,
    I am, a shadow
    that grows longer as the sun
    moves, drawn out
    on a thread of wonder.
    If I bear burdens
    they begin to be remembered
    as gifts, goods, a basket
    of bread that hurts
    my shoulders but closes me
    in fragrance. I can
    eat as I go.


    - Denise Levertov
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  47. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  48. TopTop #1616
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Rider


    A boy told me
    if he roller-skated fast enough
    his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
    the best reason I ever heard
    for trying to be a champion.
    What I wonder tonight
    pedaling hard down King William Street
    is if it translates to bicycles.
    A victory! To leave your loneliness
    panting behind you on some street corner
    while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
    pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
    no matter how slowly they fell.


    - Naomi Shihab Nye
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  49. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  50. TopTop #1617
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Mower


    The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
    A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
    Killed. It had been in the long grass.


    I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
    Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
    Unmendably. Burial was no help:


    Next morning I got up and it did not.
    The first day after a death, the new absence
    Is always the same; we should be careful


    Of each other, we should be kind
    While there is still time.


    - Phillip Larkin
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  51. TopTop #1618
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Continent's End




    At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,
    wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
    The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

    I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks,
    felt behind me
    Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

    I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings
    that flower the south,
    Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours
    that has followed the evening star.

    The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you,
    you have forgotten us, mother.
    You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb
    and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.

    It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and
    you have grown bitter; life retains
    Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness,
    the insolent quietness of stone.

    The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child,
    but there is in me
    Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched
    before there was an ocean.

    That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor
    and watched you change them,
    That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock,
    shift places with the continents.

    Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm
    I never learned it of you.
    Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones
    flow from the older fountain.


    - Robinson Jeffers
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  52. Gratitude expressed by:

  53. TopTop #1619
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Heart Labor


    When I work too hard and then lie down,
    even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
    You want me to name the specific sorrows?
    They do not matter. You have your own.
    Most of the people in the world
    go out to work, day after day,
    with their voices chained in their throats.
    I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
    Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
    and deep blue holes I cannot see
    churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
    The Greeks have a word, paropono,
    for the complaint without answer,
    for how the heart labors, while
    all the time our faces appear calm
    enough to float through in the moonlight.


    - Maggie Anderson
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  54. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  55. TopTop #1620
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    With Elephants

    With elephants everything
    volumes
    down.

    A cascade of cliff
    lumbering
    on four limber pillars.

    A fog of stone
    always slowly
    moving west.

    A strolling Niagara, yes.

    Wearing a wardrobe
    of loose-fitting determination,
    she looms
    her great sweet
    buxom
    daunt.

    You have felt their stone-tough,
    bristly,
    sensitive
    proboscis.
    It snouts around like the foot of a snail.
    until it clamps the morsel of crackerjack,
    which it,
    like an undersea thing,
    daintily,
    and confidently
    and insouciantly
    and speedily
    imparts
    into its heart-shaped maw.

    Bad for the tusks?

    Well, elephant dentists and nutritionists say
    Elephants must eat
    for their health and satisfaction,
    every day
    of popcorn
    a silo.

    So who am I to lecture an elephant –
    vegan as she is –
    about weight-loss?

    Elephants remember
    to diet on whole savannahs
    and toss their massy heads about,
    making gales with their ears

    and, with their Cyrano noses,
    announce ––
    stand back! ––

    Triumphals!


    - Bruce Moody
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