Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Ronaldo]

My background photo of Segal's holocaust memorial sculpture adjacent to Legion of Honor, SF.

[Larry Robinson]

self astronomy


a theory about emotions
they are like telescopes
you see yourself in one
everything is enormous


but if you turn it around
to find how others see you
a distant miniature
too faint to really discern


- Kevin Pryne

[Ronaldo]

Background Image by Lorna Simpson – "Deep Blue"

[Larry Robinson]

After

after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
after boarding up all the windows and doors;

after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
after building my house on the rock of no,
inaccessible to flattery and fear;

after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
after hurling handfuls of silence
and monosyllable of scorn at my loves;

after forgetting my name;
and the name of my birthplace;
and the name of my race;

after judging and sentencing myself
to perpetual waiting,
and perpetual loneliness, I heard
against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms,

the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.


- Octavio Paz
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

In The Caves of Swimmers

In the Gilf Kebir plateau in the Sahara side
of Egypt there is a cave containing rock paintings
of swimming figures. Did these figures represent
escaping an Ice Age climate change, a desert
drought, or a Paleolithic form of buoyancy found in
dreams? It's possible they were learning a way
of moving inside their lives amid the waters of
uncertainty. There is a sense that they are
practicing a devotional shape of their own dream
of life; it could be that they are swimming towards
God.

In the caves of our own current lives, whether
floating or drowning in a troubled ocean, aren't we
pulled by a magnet in the same divine direction?
From our own beds at night we may float the storm,
dive into an astral star wave, not to flee but answer
a distant beckoning. It has been called levitation, this
rising in a luminous night spell like the gesture of prayer
in a swimmer's breath that reaches for the shore.
It's been called astral projection, rising, lighter than bones,
above our bedroom walls, beyond ceilings of moons and
paths of stars like an ageless body swimming through
centuries of sleep.

- Rich Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

Atavism


1
Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes
you were like this once, there was air,
and quiet; it was by a lake, or
maybe a river you were alert
as an otter and were suddenly born
like the evening star into wide
still worlds like this one you have found
again, for a moment, in the open.


2
Something is being told in the woods: aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found, eating, dying, being born.
A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind, away out over everything.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight

I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.

Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.

Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.

- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Betrothed

You hear yourself walking on the snow.
You hear the absence of the birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. They say we are born alone,
to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure. When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life. The black
and white of me mated with this indifferent
winter landscape. I think of the moon
coming in a little while to find the white
among these colorless pines.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

the total thrust is global justice


The total thrust is
global justice
so we gotta fix the politics
and put a check upon its economics
or before you know it, a warrior-poet
may try to upend the
corporate agenda that's
got 'em blind to the real bottom line.
It's intense when you sense the only interests
on the docket
are fat cats with Republi-Crats
in their pocket.
It's crooked now
just look at how
the pundits are funded.
They're devious at CBS and, yes,
they'll choose the news that fits the script unless
I play tricks on the matrix.
(In case you can't guess shit,
I'm not to be messed with.)
The folks know my art form
comes straight from the heart for 'em.
A lyrical storm that departs from the norm
and transforms as I'm giving
rhymes for the minds in the times that we live in.
I can't hang with the anguish
and I don't want my language to languish
'cause there ain't nothing like Drew's
hip hop haikus
I got a mandate
to disturb
the urban landscape.

We got tyrannies
right here in these
States,
and you never know
when they'll go
right back to some tactics
like COINTELPRO.
If we could see through the lies
see how they brutalize
and get cops
to beat speech in the streets
and guard sweatshops.
I'm ending these industries.
Please can we factor the
effect of the
trajectory?
This whole place is racist
and sexist from North
Dakota down to Texas
with the twenty-first century's
youth in penitentiaries
and the night never seemed this dark
but now half of the stars
are behind prison bars.
Oh say can you see?
But if we can dream a new day it may be.
You had to know the baddest bro
with the phattest flow would shake up the status quo
with my adjectives and adverbs and ad libs.
Like Gandhi
protest is my modus operandi.
It's like Malcolm and Martin's
evolution with art
and revolution
'cause the total thrust is
global justice.


- Drew Dellinger

[Larry Robinson]

In this World


The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Place

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Variation on a Theme


Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen
and the dogs who are guiding me


- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Poem Liturgy

There is an energy
That insists its way into words.

Mary Oliver knew about it
And so hid pencils in trees
Where she walked daily in the woods.
The mystery of that energy
might come, she knew
with its inescapable calling card,
and in the breeze of morning
send her to her knees

There close enough to earth and
under the daily office of sky

she could find what she needed to worship.

- Judith Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Paris

J'ai vu Paris dans l'ombre
Hypogée où l'on riait trop
Paris une grande améthyste
Ces soldats belges en troupe
Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette
Après le pot-au-lait
L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits
J'ai entendu la berloque
Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité
Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann
Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis
Les peintres travaillaient
Mon cœur t'adore

- Guillaume Apollinaire

[Larry Robinson]

The Excesses of God

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Ronaldo]

I asked my friend Tom Bissinger to translate the poem, Paris. Tom's been to Paris, once as an extra in the 1969 film: "If It'sTuesday, This Must Be Belgium" with Suzanne Pleshette'.

• Paris
• J'ai vu Paris dans l’ombre. I’ve seen shadowy Paris
• Hypogée où l'on riait trop A subterranean chamber where one laughed too much
• Paris une grande améthyste Paris a gleaming amethyst
• Ces soldats belges en troupe like a troop of Belgian soldiers
• Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette old dames dressed in Perrette
• Après le pot-au-lait. after their lattes (chocolate dessert, yogurt?)
• L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits The flight captain retells his exploits
• J'ai entendu la berloque. I understood the berloque (?)
• Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité but that grin of those who had deferred that boundless summons
• Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann Shakespeare’s shadow on the Boulevard Haussmann
• Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis the ugly polite dress of men who are still here
• Les peintres travaillaient Painters work/ paint
• Mon cœur t’adore. My heart (pun on dog) worships you

Paris

J'ai vu Paris dans l'ombre
Hypogée où l'on riait trop
Paris une grande améthyste
Ces soldats belges en troupe
Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette
Après le pot-au-lait
L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits
J'ai entendu la berloque
Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité
Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann
Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis
Les peintres travaillaient
Mon cœur t'adore

- Guillaume Apollinaire

[Larry Robinson]

The stations of the cross

The stations of the cross are set—
so, too, the visions
of those few parishioners
who come to worship
this Good Friday evening.
Three thunder-loud percussive shocks—
the scepter strikes the floor
and space cracks open
that here and now, all these centuries gone,
his words might still be felt and heard.
His simple words, then, illumined by a scripture passage
and a silent meditation, framed by clear bell tones.
There follows an offering of other words, mystic ones,
this time turned visual by a dancer’s supple body’s moves,
a second time of silence, then,
a longer time of sharing,
and simple singing,
together, as one by one,
in single file, this row of souls
makes its reverent way
from this station
of the cross
to the next
until their
ritual is
done—
until it
is finished.

It was the time of sharing,
that made the worship real:
dour and dark one voice,
rainbow light and wistful another
a fear of death in each
spoken, embraced or left unsaid,
measured and melodious, another
even in futile effort to bare a wound
that could not be born
before these few
nor before the cross itself,
thoughtful, redolent of real hope
this other worshiper’s words—
hope found for him in the personhood of god.
Jewels, all, these spoken words, before the cross
and smiles and laughter too were there
and memories brought back from childhood
and from Latin liturgy sung—
and there it ended in beauty
with an offering—unsought, unplanned—
a gift of grace—a single voice,
singing, in love, the Latin tongue—
Gregorian in its feel and subtle melody—
singing the beauty of the tree,
the beauty of that very tree
from which the cross of Christ had come,
that once living tree, now felled and dead,
that bore, this night, those centuries gone,
his dying body.


- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

Exodus: The Never
Ending Story

Exodus
from America
is a phrase that one
is beginning to hear more
and more during these days.

The E word
sits in our DNA.
Yes, we’ll celebrate
the great escape from Egypt
but it’s never what is seems in the
land of those Mitzraims: Canaan, Rome, and
Spain, tragic illusions and heart-breaking dreams.

Yes, we’ll
celebrate spring and
renewal, the miracle of
creation, but along the tracks
of our pilgrimage we have had our
original tickets punched merely as travel
visas, affirming the truth that all beings on this
earth are undocumented immigrants walking hand

in hand
through the
the Sinai sand,
across the Edmond Pettis
Bridge and the parched desert
darkness toward the Rio Grand.
The hands that penned the Torah did not
begin with the creation or the fall but clearly
proclaimed the duty for us all to heed the next call
when the next Pharaoh starts to build the next wall.



* Mitzrayim: the Hebrew word for ancient Egypt/the ‘narrow
place” both in geography and the human heart.


- Bruce Silverman

[Larry Robinson]

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike

[Larry Robinson]

Tomorrow

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeks
poking through
our skulls.


Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.


Drunk on music,
who needs wine?


Come on,
sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve
still got feet.


- David Budbill

[Larry Robinson]

A Piece of the Storm
for Sharon Horvath

From the shadow of domes
in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one,
weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair
where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That’s all
There was to it.
No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling
away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times,
a flowerless funeral.
No more than that
Except for the feeling
that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing
before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence,
sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready.
The sky has an opening.”

- Mark Strand




"Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."

[Larry Robinson]

Ode to This Small Joy

Someone discovered
the giraffe hums
at a harmonic rate
of 92 Hertz,
voice thrumming
the tower of spine
and trachea once
thought to be silent,
and her humming is
like monks chanting
holy and ascetic,
the vibrations rolling
up the vertebrae
gentle and slow,
a long-lashed
face lifting
from water to sky,
taut dark sides
veined with light
ready to crack
open the body.

- Maria Calabretta Cancio-Bello

[Larry Robinson]

vi

At the council of animals
our people are on trial
we are inconvenienced, angry—
they struggle pathetically with disease

the long list of extinct species is noted

an envoy from the ants arrives
and speaks of the time we,
or one of us, chose in drowsy
compassion to save an ant’s life

our case is referred to the plants

trees are emotion itself—so fully open
to the elements that they do not move, save
in the wind—always sumptuous, always
digging for more strength, more knowledge

yet they pause to ask us
Do you know were you come from?

What you walk on? Whither you go?

- Lee Perron

[Larry Robinson]

Now is the Time

Don’t let the jewels remain buried
at the bottom of the ocean

Dive deep
Hold your breath
Let another breath breathe you

Let the breath of the universe
propel you ever deeper
into the mystery of Being

Surrendering to the unknown
as it unfolds in your life

Moment by moment
Miracle by miracle

What jewels will you bring
to the surface to share with the world?

What gold did you find hidden
in the depths of the darkness?

Wear it as a crown,
a symbol of the wisdom
and power discovered
in the depths of your Being

Let the voice of love
find its expression
through your heart
broken or unbroken

No need to wait for perfection
to let your light shine
You’re already reflecting
the perfect light

Let the heart of compassion
flow as a river of mercy
into the wounds of humanity

Now is the time
Now is the time
Now is the time

- Kathleen Rose McTeigue

[Larry Robinson]

Music


When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I’ve never understood
Why this is so
But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.


- Anne Porter

---

[Larry Robinson]

Under a Wild Green Fig Tree

I am going to eat seven pomegranate seeds
and lie down under a wild green fig tree
in a field that has been ploughed three times

because I want to sleep in fertile soil
sinking into dream time, dream space,
and slip past the door to the underworld,

which has been left ajar for questers
and adepts, for reckless night revelers
stumbling into the corridor of ghosts,

so I can wander the subterranean realm
and listen to Persephone’s hell songs,
music she could learn only in Hades—

the low, fateful lyrics of death,
the soul’s radical return to innocence,
the earth’s eternal movement and passage,

our deep human labor to become spirits,
our almost vegetal need to be reborn,
the cycle of loss, myth of regeneration.

- Edward Hirsch

[Ronaldo]

Not wild, but growing in the back yard.

Under a Wild Green Fig Tree
...

[Larry Robinson]

Candles in Babylon

Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles, trying to shield
the shivering flames, crying
"Sleepers Awake!"
hoping
the rhyme's promise was true,
that we may return
from this place of terror
home to a calm dawn and
the work we had just begun.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die

walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something

more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
so out from us there’s no vocabulary

but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time

into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous

—beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

or life, rage
for order, rage for destruction

beyond this love which stirs
the air every time she walks into the room

These impersonae, however we call them
won’t invade us as on movie screens

they are so old, so new, we are not to them
we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

of our tilted gazing
but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

- Adrienne Rich

[Larry Robinson]

What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?

I don’t want to change my thoughts. I want to change the way I think. I want to think in images, in stories spun as threads arising long and slow out of culture and out of the Grandmother Spider of indigenous mind. I want to learn to live in the old ways, the ways of spirit. I want to see the signs and the deep, precise wisdom of the true ones – ancestors, elders, any and all trying to inform us that there is a way - there is a way to heal, there is a way to see, there is a way to change direction, there is a way to give the children what they need to be safe to be listening to be healthy to be whole. I, too, want to be whole all the way into death and, yes, I’ll say it, beyond death, beyond it but not beyond the cycle of being - the ring, the hoop of being together. This is the place where Love remains, where Love sustains, where Love comes into and through all things. Love is spirit flowing into the life of the world. Knowing this I am left with a question to pose to myself: What would an indigenous grandmother do?

- Maya Spector