Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Now is the Time


Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.


Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.


Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.


Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.


My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?


What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?


Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.


This is the time for you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.


Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.


-Hafiz
(translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

[Larry Robinson]

Writing A Lesson

I spend so much time
Writing a lesson
I'm a teacher you know
A Licensed Teacher at that
I try to impart wisdom
Cloaked often in humor
Wrap it all up in a twenty minute package
Tie on a blow of blessing
To hope that at least one person
Is nudged toward personal healing.
But Hafiz
Oh Hafiz
In less than thirty short lines
Gives a more complete
Lesson
Than all the teachers
Who have come before
Yet I will continue to sing my song
Bathed in the melody
Of Hafiz


- David McNair

[Larry Robinson]

A Plea in a Foreign Tongue

The Spanish moss streaming off
the branches of a hillside of black oaks
like olive sheets of rain,
a wailing of ancestral grief
brings real tears to my eyes.
They have seen and felt so much, these trees.
Through their roots:
They have felt how we have thinned
and poisoned the soil;
how our anger and greed for power
has scorched the earth with the flame of drought.
Through the tips of their branches:
How we have sullied the air
with the smoke of delusion.
They grieve for the loss of the great trees,
the grizzly, the herds of elk,
the thick flocks of birds,
who lived and worshipped in their branches,
and for the people who knew their place,
and did not set themselves
apart from nature.
Who loved the land
as they loved themselves.

There is not much time they seem to say.
They are not afraid, but they mourn.
Perhaps we only have weeks to learn
their language, so ancient and
undecipherable to us.
We cannot go back you say.
But we cannot go forward without
reimagining who we are.


- Barry Vesser

[Ronaldo]

[Larry Robinson]

Immigrants in Our Own Land


We are born with dreams in our hearts,

looking for better days ahead.

At the gates we are given new papers,

our old clothes are taken

and we are given overalls like mechanics wear.

We are given shots and doctors ask questions.

Then we gather in another room

where counselors orient us to the new land

we will now live in. We take tests.

Some of us were craftsmen in the old world,

good with our hands and proud of our work.

Others were good with their heads.

They used common sense like scholars

use glasses and books to reach the world.

But most of us didn’t finish high school.



The old men who have lived here stare at us,

from deep disturbed eyes, sulking, retreated.

We pass them as they stand around idle,

leaning on shovels and rakes or against walls.

Our expectations are high: in the old world,

they talked about rehabilitation,

about being able to finish school,

and learning an extra good trade.

But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers,

to work in fields for three cents an hour.

The administration says this is temporary

So we go about our business, blacks with blacks,

poor whites with poor whites,

chicanos and indians by themselves.

The administration says this is right,

no mixing of cultures, let them stay apart,

like in the old neighborhoods we came from.



We came here to get away from false promises,

from dictators in our neighborhoods,

who wore blue suits and broke our doors down

when they wanted, arrested us when they felt like,

swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased.

But it’s no different here. It’s all concentrated.

The doctors don’t care, our bodies decay,

our minds deteriorate, we learn nothing of value.

Our lives don’t get better, we go down quick.



My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines,

my T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and pants are drying.

Just like it used to be in my neighborhood:

from all the tenements laundry hung window to window.

Across the way Joey is sticking his hands

through the bars to hand Felipé a cigarette,

men are hollering back and forth cell to cell,

saying their sinks don’t work,

or somebody downstairs hollers angrily

about a toilet overflowing,

or that the heaters don’t work.



I ask Coyote next door to shoot me over

a little more soap to finish my laundry.

I look down and see new immigrants coming in,

mattresses rolled up and on their shoulders,

new haircuts and brogan boots,

looking around, each with a dream in their heart,

thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives.



But in the end, some will just sit around

talking about how good the old world was.

Some of the younger ones will become gangsters.

Some will die and others will go on living

without a soul, a future, or a reason to live.

Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes,

but so very few make it out of here as human

as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now

as they look at their hands so long away from their tools,

as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families,

so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.


- Jimmy Santiago Baca

[Larry Robinson]

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing


Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.


- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph


Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

- Anne Sexton

[Larry Robinson]

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.


III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

- W. H. Auden

[Roland Jacopetti]

Hi, Larry. One of the all-time greats. Thank you. Roland

In Memory of W. B. Yeats...

[Larry Robinson]

Stardust Lounge

My mother came for a visit
even though she died last spring.
She was standing by the foot of my bed
releasing vowels from the afterlife
smelling of moss and spring rain
on the tarmac.
Here we go again, old recipes and lectures,
I thought, stumbling out the door into the back yard
while the history of all forgotten things
was leaking out of her apron pockets
like the Andromeda strain or the Milky
Way filled with impossible features of dead stars.
All she really wanted was for me to follow
her lead in this shuffle-foot shim-sham, this
millennial foxtrot of flesh turning into
stardust, that long unwinding road
pale as beer made from wheat where
we all crowd into a room and wait for
the unmarked bus to transport us into the highlands
of the forever lands. This is the way it feels
when she presses her hand against the small of my back.
The valley gorge that rests between my hips and heart
wakes up and smiles and even the smallest bones
like the swing when she says anything is possible
and I want to answer her but am lifted off my feet
shucking the chrysalis of my life, resurrecting the
boogie-woogie, dancing in the midnight arms
of her Stardust Lounge.


- Devreaux Baker

[Roland Jacopetti]

Larry - Another fabulous offering! Thanks so much. Roland

Stardust Lounge...

[Larry Robinson]

The Whale’s Song

I am the last gray—
the last ocean bottom farmer
beyond lonely,
lost,
terrified.

I swim in waters too warm
for my ancestors and kin,
pickings so slim
we starve.

We have danced
in the depths for eons,
the ocean’s moods and moons
embedded in our bones
and mottled skin.

I bear her barnacles
and
grief.

Our surging into the deep—
that constant churning
kept the planet’s plankton
balance.

How will you live now
young, foolish species?

I am the last gray—
wailing.

- Raphael Block

[Larry Robinson]

For Love


for Bobbie


Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all


that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,


different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.


If the moon did not ...
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not


do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not


now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything


as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.


Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous


self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.


Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,


companion, good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.


Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in


some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.


Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you


also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to


say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.


- Robert Creely

[Larry Robinson]

The Dakini Speaks


My friends, let's grow up.
Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long?
Let's grieve our losses fully, like human ripe beings.
But please, let's not be so shocked by them.
Let's not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.


Impermanence is life's only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.


To a child, she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise.
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it!
Let's stop making deals for a safe passage -
There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore.


The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let's dance the wild dance of no hope.


- Jennifer Wellwood

[Larry Robinson]

Visiting an Old Teacher
For Dr. Robert Hall


The light I used to see in your eyes
Has gone somewhere else.
It's odd, isn't it?
What goes and what stays.


When you spoke at the meditation center,
I felt your kindness.
You talked about resting, just resting.
A door opened in my heart then.
I did rest. I breathed easily.


I thought of all the love
I had received in my life, including from you.
I felt a wave of gratitude break in my body.
It almost reached my eyes.
I asked myself,
"Would I cry, in Mexico?"
For you, or for myself?


Afterwards, you sat in the bright sun on the patio.
I asked you if you wanted to go out for coffee or a walk,
You smiled and said, "Oh, I don't do that, anymore."
Okay.


Your partner helped you down the stone steps
to your car.
It's odd, isn't it? What goes and what stays.


You've been with me, this long.
- Geo Taylor

[Larry Robinson]

Dear Teacher


I see you now, deep diver, spear
Gun hidden close to your body,
Hunter, you plant hooks, piercing
Fragile flesh of the female psyche


Save other tools for men,
Your troop of sleeping eunuchs,
Lulled by stories of awakening.
They drift on your charm, the charisma of one
Who feigns wisdom so well.


You feign humility well too,
Perhaps you fool even yourself.


The first time I saw
Your shadow throw its
Cold arms around an elderly woman
I excused you, my sight
Wanting what you claimed,
You feigned to offer.


The first, for me, but not
The first, exodus, you casually
Betrayed yourself, waving goodbye
To those you wounded,
Behind a watery apology,
Weakened by charming excuses
Of over-enthusiasm. Clever.


Ignoring the apparent,
Indulging in your attention
We allowed you to penetrate
Our minds, plant poisonous
Images along with nourishment.


Your spear spiked hearts,
Opening all to love
You. You, who may know
An idea of larger love,
But are incapable
Of individual love, specific Empathy.
Speaking of compassion, you are immune
To compassion for the bleeding
In your home.


Always aiming for the sex
Watching for the awakening
Of desire. You hunt with
Bait: flattery, focus and soft,
Cunningly placed kindnesses.
A net cast wide, your wandering
Eye. You capture whatever
Heart and body opens first.


Moving like the sleeping shark,
Never fully awake
Nor asleep in peace,
You hunger,
A hungry ghost, you
Feed on fear, growing fat on
Our attention. Growing thin and
Never sated.


My heart would break
For the unloveliness of
You, who won’t be seen,
But there’s precious few
Places left, most taken
By your broken and
Healing sisters.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

The Burning of the Books

When the Regime

commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.


Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged: he’d been excluded!


He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fiery letters to the morons in power—
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen—
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!


- Bertolt Brecht


(translation by Michael R. Burch)

[Larry Robinson]

In Muir Woods


Last night, a giant redwood fell

either from old age, disease, or
"sometimes they just give up," the ranger said.
Listen, I was in the woods, I
heard it too, like my own death
falling inside me.
Here in the last of the old growth forests
where some trees are still virginal,
some older than Moses,
I thought, then, of you. You are not the one
dying, you said to me,
and I quoted to you from Montaigne
that death was not a proper object of fear
but only the end of life.
What is a proper object of fear, you asked,
and I said death of the heart.
But life, you said, was
everything. And you were in love
with that beautiful lie.
Sometimes these trees send out
all their sap at once
making them vulnerable, sometimes,
they grow burls of anxiety
Look, the ranger said to us,
the bark is so wet because the tree
drinks hundreds of gallons of water a day
from the fog that rolls in
over the Golden Gate Bridge.
That bridge which is so beautiful and which
holds such promise for tomorrow
with its blue shimmering bay.
Every day when I see the fog now,
I think of you and then I can almost
feel the fog cover me with
that enveloping mist, can almost feel
the branches of the redwood
being kissed by its cold
ministrations. I would, if I could,
stand here all day like these trees, but my
heart is so sore, it is almost ready to burst,
and I am filled, suddenly,
with a wild and insatiable thirst.

- June Besich

[Larry Robinson]

Dot Over The I

What's in the glint of a hummingbird?
In the shorthand of the sweetheart rose?
A meager now.
A precious here.
The dot God put in the i

But I am in the wind;
always somewhere else,
scattering God.
Not now.
Not here.

Punta Sobre La I

Que resume el colibri?
Que abrevia la rosa de pitimini?
Un escaso ahora.
Un precioso aqui.
Dios hecho punto
sobre la i.

Pero estoy de viento
siempre en otra parte
a Dios diluyendo.
Ni ahora.
Ni aqui.

- Ulalume Gonzales de Leon
(translation by Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Nancy Morales)

[Larry Robinson]

A Riddle in Troubled Times


A grain of It is next to naught
a half is half corrupted,
the whole…?
if even a single
link is compromised,
the chain cannot
secure its anchor


If Its provenance is
God Almighty
as theologians claim,
pray which deity
do they mean,
and for the love of God
what is a Holy War?


If It is just
a matter of consensus,
can fast-talking-double-dealing
politicians wear their slogans gauzy;
then can a multitude of ranting-chanting,
banner-toting, blindly-voting citizens
be dead wrong


Scientists insist Its place is in their forge
to assay and refine for all mankind,


but might It be the poets’ rightful realm,
I mean the ones who understand the currency
and can navigate in unpredictable terrain.
Undeterred by what may be revealed,
they spelunk ice caves at the poles
to test their tolerance for stinging cold


In search of It,
they’ll sift through bones
of buried civilizations
unearthing at last
none other than
their own familiar skulls

- b. armstrong

[Larry Robinson]

The Weighing


The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.


- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

The World Ended Today


“We cannot live alone in a world of wounds.” A. Leopold


The world ended today
But no one noticed
Just another day
Business as usual.
No one noticed
The holocaust of animal genocide
The ghost oceans, the withered soil
Judas in the White House
America hanging on the Cross.
Trophies handed out for the best lies.
Trophies for the head of a lion
Tail of an elephant, feathers of a turtle dove
Wings of a monarch butterfly.
Children marinate in cages at the borders of greed and hate.
The world ended again today.
Floods and fires, air gasping for breath
Wisdom shipwrecked on dead languages
Rewritten history, swindled education
Surrendered truth. Words disappearing
As we speak in grunts and groans
Whimpers and shrieks
Or stunned silences
Where are you lovers of liberty?
“When in the course of human events”
Again and again the world ends.
The moon looks on pityingly
As humanity shrinks away from the sight of
Hell on earth.
Paradise bleeds out from the rotting corpses
Of love.
“We hold these truths to be self evident”
The world ends again beneath the avalanche
Concussion after concussion of hope.
But it is just another day
Business as usual
Crack open another beer or bottle of wine
Eat up and shut up.
Guns locked and loaded.
Television casual distraction from the massacre
Of justice. We are mesmerized like a school of fish
Swept up in the sly antics of the internet.
Who wins or who loses is so important that
We cannot hear above the applause cheers furtive
Buying and selling marching troops threats scandal
The nuclear subs circling like sharks the climate ticking away
Media frenzy, our own ravaged lives,some homeless and others
Losing the home of self respect replaced by shame and terror.
But it is just another day
The world has ended again
And no one noticed.


- Gail Onion

[Larry Robinson]

Medea
For T. E.


I had always been Rhea in Colchis
but, at 14, I first spoke my own name
in Circe’s shadow. A sunlit breeze
lifted the red curtains in our candled rooms
where the loom ran, healer and deceiver.
Later, ambling along the barren coast
I was a weave of sun and blackness.
Far in the west, the gold flash of a prow.


And when the oarsmen first saw the far shore
they rose and cheered. A new fury seized them
with courage and the ship of heroes leaped
swiftly through the waves to a drum’s blows.
In the first glow of the goddess’ fires
my eyes were lost in sullen wonder,
my breath came shallow as a grave in sand
and the great vessel entered our small port.


In worlds destroyed
what still shines?
Under shattered patterns
run ancient lines.


- Kevin Pryne

[Larry Robinson]

Reuniting With Beauty


It stops there!
All the greed, blindness, hate, lies.
Out there!


I have been letting you in
too much,
too deep,
for too long.
I don't even know
my own soul anymore,
my own peace.
My head is filled
with your ill-will.
No — Out There,
it stops Out There.


Morning is here.
I awake to the newness
of the day.
I awake to the adventure
it holds.


Today, like every day,
I have a chance to start over,
to greet the sun,
to smell the flowers,
to bathe in nature
and breathe her in.


Today I smile
with the universe.


Today I accept
the invitation
that beauty brings.


- Sherrie Lovler

[Larry Robinson]

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

- Lisel Mueller
(February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020)

[Ronaldo]

[Larry Robinson]

Auction

I am old and do not want
to be bothered about it.
So I rejoice at bearing witness
to these interesting times.

I see
that the deep recognition
of a righteous guide
is not happening
because the model
in the rear view mirror
cannot come up front
far enough to help us.

She knows
that the backbone
of humankind
has never cracked
like this
before.

Now
the truth comes
in many artificial flavors
and core baby sweet Jesus
is no longer up for adoption.

- Rabon Saip

[Larry Robinson]

Sincerely

Dear Whole Planet Boy from another world
it is I, Excalibur Orchid Door, coming in
from the page to greet your full eyes
which are looking by way of sky into
every house of trees.
These trees, always whispering to me of
the half-sung wing, are the place I rest.
We are calling out from the handmade
word, white stones laid down soft from
our mouths like bad puppets.
Still, we fly together at the end of a long
crying string, and each fresh day earned alive
is a new kind of moon,
soft with its light dust, thick with floating.
In the sky my eyes are wild too,
sorting the bones,
sorting the caches, sorting the petals.
I am wearing my heartbeat like your small coat;
time my favorite jumping rope is helping me
Hello

- Kalia Mussetter

[Larry Robinson]

The Fawn




Sunday morning and mellow as precious metal
The church bells rang, but I went
To the woods instead.

A fawn, too new
For fear, rose from the grass
And stood with its spots blazing,
And knowing no way but words,
No trick but music,
I sang to him.

He listened.
His small hooves struck the grass.
Oh what is holiness?

The fawn came closer,
Walked to my hands, to my knees.

I did not touch him.
I only sang, and when the doe came back
Calling out to him dolefully
And he turned and followed her into the trees,
Still I sang,
Not knowing how to end such a joyful text,

Until far off the bells once more tipped and tumbled
And rang through the morning, announcing
The going forth of the blessed.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Stardust




What’s in a star? We are.
All the elements of our body and of the planet
were once in the belly of a star.
We are stardust.
15,000,000,000 years ago we were a mass
of hydrogen floating in space, turning slowly, dancing.
And the gas condensed more and more
gaining increasingly more mass
and mass became star and began to shine.
As they condensed they grew hot and bright.
Gravitation produced thermal energy: light and heat.
That is to say love.
Stars were born, grew, and died.
And the galaxy was taking the shape of a flower
the way it looks now on a starry night.
Our flesh and our bones come from other stars
and perhaps even from other galaxies,
we are universal,
and after death we will help to form other stars
and other galaxies.
We come from the stars, and to them we shall return.


- Ernesto Cardenal
January 20, 1925 - March 1, 2020)
( Translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Cohen)