Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Conscientious Objector

I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death.

I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn door.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans,
many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: I will not give hime a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not
Tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
The black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death; I am not
on his payroll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends, nor of
my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living that I should deliver
men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe
with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Larry Robinson]

Fuchsia

Even in late November, if you watch closely,
You can see a fuchsia begin to unfold in the morning sun.
Creamy outer lips open to reveal, at first shyly,
Then with great dignity, the stamen and pistil.

Inner lips of deeper reds are licked by a golden tongue.
Are they tasting the air? Are they beckoning the beloved?
Are they praying?
Surely it is too late in the year for bees .

Then, miracle of miracles! An Anna's hummingbird
Thrumming from behind the redwood
With its ruby throat and day-glo green cloak
Casually and delicately - but oh so precisely-
Dips in that remarkable tongue to the very core of that sweet, small fire, blessing and being blessed.

Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field.
But until this morning, I didn't really understand.
When you fully open your heart to the World,
No matter how late it is,
The World, like a lover, unlocks for you
All the doors of its treasure house.

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.


- Ranier Maria Rilke

[Larry Robinson]

The Truro Bear

There’s a bear in the Truro woods.
People have seen it - three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;
I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,
the cranberry bogs. And the sky
with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,
burns down like a brand-new heaver,
while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides
shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely
a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly
through the woods for years, learning to stay away
from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:
it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s
runaway dog. But the seed
has been planted, and when has happiness ever
required much evidence to begin
its leaf-green breathing?

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Drinking Love

Do you see what happens to you when you haven’t had a drink of love?

Nasty weather spreads across your face
until your eyes cloud with such sadness
that children become frightened
and even you own mirror won’t look back at you.

The creatures around you, begin to worry about your loneliness
And soon birds assemble in the tops of the trees
Wondering what songs they might sing to bring solace to your soul.

Even the angels become alarmed
by your heedless rush to war with anyone
and your gathering of stones to hurl
at the innocent... and at yourself

I see what happens to you when you haven’t been out drinking love
carousing among the friends of forgiveness, in the taverns of love

You step farther and farther back
analyzing, calculating, ferreting out
the hidden clauses you’re convinced are there
in the simplest conversations.

You weigh each word like a dead fish.

You grab that cockeyed ruler of yours
and from your darkness begin to measure the angles
in a radiant heart you once trusted.

This is how you get, my dear, when you
foolishly refuse to drink from love's hand.

This is why the teachers of simplicity
urge us – keep remembering god,
keep remembering god, keep remembering
so that you will come to know that he is here,
gently watching, sweetly waiting for you to accept his help.

And this is why Hafiz calls to you
“Come, come, bring your cup.
I have an endlessly leaking barrel of light and laughter
which the beloved has strapped to my back.
and I want, more than all the world,
to quench your thirst.”

Drink this freedom and you will know
that the sanest, happiest, richest among us
are those who want nothing more than to give love.

- Hafiz

[RexCasteel]

At first I laughed out loud. Now I sit, only shaking my head from side to side...

Thank you, Larry.

- R

Drinking Love

Do you see what happens to you when you haven’t had a drink of love?

Nasty weather spreads across your face
until your eyes cloud with such sadness
that children become frightened...

- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

Dead List

Black and cold outside, sunrise veiled by storm clouds.
A robin perches high in the oak outside the kitchen window to begin his daily chatter. I say my customary “good morning” to him.

Steam rises from my coffee cup; first sip tastes best.
Always intrigued reading obituaries in the morning paper;
people’s lives reduced to a handful of words.

“I check the dead list,” Tony, my neighbor used to say; he was a World War I veteran, fought for Italy. “My name not on list. Good day today!” Sad when his name finally appeared; I miss him; made me laugh, his irreverence toward the pope; telling me my back spasms were because I wasn’t getting enough; the man in me laughing, the altar boy embarrassed.

Sad when the old die; tragic when they’re young. Saw an infant’s coffin at a funeral once, it was carried by a single pallbearer. Philip, my best friend in the sixth grade died one rainy afternoon. The cave he had been digging collapsed in on him. Next day his desk was empty. Ma showed me his obituary. Young woman widowed last year; her husband killed in the war; she pregnant with their first; named the boy after his father.

Timeless this checking of dead lists, lists from Thermopylae, from Waterloo, Bull Run, Normandy, Da Nang, Baghdad. A mother’s dread realized.

We will not see the coffins bearing America’s colors return home. No day of mourning for them. Each blood sacrifice reduced to an item in the obits.

I consider making another cup of coffee but the kitchen lights flicker as flashes of lightning crack, explode, rumble through the valley shattering the predawn peace. My house trembles, window panes shake. Without mercy rain and hail pound apple trees in the orchard their blossoms fall to the ground, fruit that will never be realized. A vicious wind fells the oak, its roots point toward heaven. I hear nothing more from the robin.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

[Larry Robinson]

Finding Intelligent Design

"You don't have to look
anything farther than the sinuses
to refute Intelligent Design," my doctor says.
Yet it's plain as my nose that
Divinity has seated itself, like a satisfied old woman
on the park bench of her psyche.

So what of it?
The design we seek in the material
hides like a defiant child.

Trapped as we are
in three dimensions,
with our intelligence,
looking for Intelligence
is like seeking a galaxy
with a microscope.

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

If Poetry Were Not Morality

It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not morality.
Jean Cocteau, Past Tense

I'm the kind of woman who
when she hears Bobby McPherin sing without words
for the first time on the car radio has to
pull over and park with the motor
running. And Cecil Taylor, I pulled over
for him too, even though later the guy
at the record store said he was just
'a side man.' Something he did with silence and
mixing classical with I'm-worried-about-this-but-I
have-to-go-this-way-anyhow. This not letting me
go. What did you do, the guy asked me, when you
pulled over? Smiled, I said, sat

and smiled. If the heart could be that simple. The photo
of Gandhi's last effects taped near
my typewriter: eyeglasses, sandals, writing paper
and pen, low lap sized writing desk and something
white in the foreground like a bedroll.
Every so often, I glance at this, just paper torn
from a book, and wish I could get down to
that, a few essentials, no
more. So when I left this place it would be
humbly, as in those welfare funerals my mother
used to scorn because the county always bought

the cheapest coffins, no satin lining, and if you
wanted the dead to look comfortable
you had to supply your own
pillow. I still admire her hating to see the living
come off cheap in their homage to any life. She
was Indian enough so the kids used to
taunt me home with "Your mother's a squaw!"
Cherokee she said. And though nobody
told me, I knew her grandfather had to be
one of those chiefs who could never

get enough horses. Who, if he had two hundred,
wanted a hundred more and a hundred more
after that. Maybe he'd get up in the night and go
out among them, or watch their grazing
from a distance under moonlight. He'd pass his mind
over them where they pushed their muzzles into
each other's flanks and necks and their horseness
gleamed back at him like soundless music until
he knew something he couldn't know
as only himself, something not to be told again
even by writing down the doing

of it. I meet him like that sometimes,
wordless and perfect, with more horses than he
can ride or trade or even know why
he has. His completeness needs to be stern, measuring
what he stands to lose. His eyes
are bronze, his heart is bronze with the mystery
of it. Yet it will change his sleep
to have gazed beyond memory, I think, without sadness or
fear onto the flowing backs of horses. I look down
and see that his feet are bare, and I
have never seen such beautiful prideless feet set
on the earth. He must know what he's doing, I think, he
must not need to forgive himself the way I do

because this bounty pours onto me
so I'm crushed by surrender, heaped and
scattered and pounded into the dust with wanting more,
wanting feet like that to drive back
the shame that wants to know why
I have to go through the world like an overwrought
magnet, like the greedy Braille of so many
about-to-be-lost memories. Why can't I just
settle down by the side of the road and turn the music
up on one of those raw, uncoffined voices of
the dead --Bob Marley, Billie Holiday or the way Piaf
sang 'Je Ne Regrette Rien" so that when

the purled horse in the music asks what I want with it
we are swept aside by there being no answer except
not to be dead to each other, except for
those few moments to belong beyond deserving to
that sumptuousness of presence, so the heart
stays simple like the morality of
a robin, the weight of living so clear a mandate
it includes everything about this junkshop
of a life. And even some of our soon-to-be-deadness
catches up to us
as joy, as more horses than we need.

- Tess Gallagher

[Larry Robinson]

THE USES OF BEAUTY

1

Sundays, Father would take us
to a slough behind the Mississippi.
There, among the cypress stumps,
we'd fish the afternoon away.
Sitting with pole in hand one day,
I heard a splash and turned my head
to see a nearby pool alive!.
Its liquid silver boiled up
gleaming, rainbow forms
that broke the surface,
then dove down again
in streamlined arcs.

Had the sun itself
divided into shards
and come down here?
Were these Apollo's fish,
swimming in their sacred pool?

Picking up my net, I trapped
those flashing wonders, one by one,
exulting in each success. Soon
no more living miracles
disturbed the water.
We took them home.
I don't remember
if we even
fried them up.

2

The first time I saw mountains,
we were driving through the Ozarks,
from St. Louis to Hot Springs.
The highway wound. Suddenly,
an overlook: valley, hills and sky;
a million trees, a haze; a harmony.
We parked, got out. My spirit
flew, expanding,
out into that great bowl;
and returned in silent wonder.

And then my thoughts caught up.
My body remembered knots.
My mind churned out the question:
”What do you do with all that Beauty?”

3

Half a century has passed.
If I were with that boy
I used to be, I’d tell him
“Beauty’s all there is;”
then take him in my arms
and hold him till he quieted
enough to know it’s true.

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

Spiritual Chickens

A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly. The man is in the process of picking his teeth. Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens. The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes through her. He calls in his wife but she can see nothing. This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her. How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream? The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure. Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head. Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy. Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen. Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself. Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it. She would grow vain, egotistical, she would look for someone to fight, but being a chicken she can just enjoy it and make little squawks, silent to all except the man who ate her, who is far off banging his head against a wall like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel, making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in or nothing of value falls out. How happy he would have been to be born a chicken, to be of good use to his fellow creatures and rich in companionship after death. As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world. Better to have a broken head--why surrender his corner on the truth?--better just to go crazy.

- Stephen Dobyns

[Larry Robinson]

Cleaning Up After the Poetry Salon

It's not always easy.

Proper nouns are manageable.
They stack well.
Biggest on the bottom -
The Great Plains, Idaho, Mt. Rainier -
then the smaller stuff left behind -
Boxcars, photographs, you know.

Adjectives are remarkably tough to clean up.
The dry ones catch on the furniture,
bury themselves in cracks
hide in the pocket of an old sweater.
They crumble to awkward, ungainly,
unmanageable, yes fragile
pieces …that somehow cunningly avoid
the shedding broom some poet has
left behind.
And wet ones like sticky and slimy - yikes!

Cleaning up the leavings of Wendell Berry?
it's a grange meeting hall.
Rich black dirt everywhere,
corn stalks, the lingering thick odor of
compost and just a hint of cow manure
on your shoes and your best carpet.

And Jesus! Those poems about stars -
the poets have no idea.
Whole constellations left behind -
Watch it with the Pleides, they have sharp points
And yes, the Dog Star does bite.

My rule would be -
you brought 'em, you take 'em home.

Food is good in a poem.
Mom's apple pie and romantic dinner's for two
are usually digested by the salon - no leftovers.
It's the ethnic dishes with strange names
luedafisk, sauerkraut, gefiltafish
and anything made with hot peppers
Well, you know.

Poets - a little consideration -
slip in some sponges, maybe
a mop or really - just a mouthful of food,
a spoonful -
yes, spoons for everybody.

And come on,
no animals bigger than a cat or small dog.
polar bears and coyotes are disasters.

Oh I could go on…
mixed metaphors sliding
down the walls and tangled
in the drapes.

Cliches hiding their heads in the corners.
shy, embarrassed marmots standing by dead seals.
stinking sea weed and sharks behind the sofa
And fish - fish beyond number -
flopping on the floor.

Verbs are easy - they move around
so much - just
open the door and they
take care of themselves.

But poets,
It's the birds left behind…
Egret, Robin, wrens, a flock of seagulls,
a murder of crows…
For God's sake leave a window open.

But eagle, oh my friends, the eagle
he glowers there
from the chandelier
Royally pissed!
A moment in a poem
then forgotten
in the closed room.

I know, I know.
I'm making a new mess now -
I'll need some help here with
Idaho and that eagle.

For the rest
I brought 'em.
I'll take 'em home.

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

Walking Through a Wall

Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said “Say, I want to try that.” Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren’t so good. They won’t hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren’t pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it’s the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence. I don’t know, but I’ve torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through to the other side.

- Louis Jenkins

[Larry Robinson]

we are running

running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we’re running
toward
is what we want.

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

Amazing Peace

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done
to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness
high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence
and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged
as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth,
brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches,
breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft.
Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now.
It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war.
But true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth's tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.


Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

- Maya Angelou

[Larry Robinson]

The Bad Old Days

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
Suppers of fried potatoes and
Fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
Of my misery I felt rising
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is
Everywhere, you don’t have to
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.

- Kenneth Rexroth

[Larry Robinson]

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens


- William Carlos Williams

[Larry Robinson]

Imagining

What if God isnʼt a noun
to be empowered and worshiped
but a verb of creation
powered by love?

What if every single tree
drawn in primary school
is a sacred work of art
worthy of joyful notice?

What if our lives are built
on a web of kindness,
a net,
which holds everything living.

What if the rocks are alive
singing strength and courage;
vibrating
from our feet right up to our heart?

What if we loved ourselves
as deeply as the mountain
who,
caressed by water,
surrenders herself
into sand?

What if our most loved,
intra-national pastime
is a game of entertainment
where we all win?

What if no one aspired
to be a millionaire
and money no longer had power
but was simply a means of tender-ness.

What if transforming our world
by imagining it
can
actually make it happen?

- Deborah Rodney

[Larry Robinson]

Some Questions about the Storm

What's the bird ratio overhead?
Zero: zero. Maybe it's El Niño?

The storm, was it bad?
Here the worst ever. Every tree hurt.

Do you love trees?
Only the gingko, the fir, the birch.

Yours? Do you name your trees?
Who owns the trees? Who's talking

You presume a dialogue. Me and You.
Yes. Your fingers tap. I'm listening.

Will you answer? Why mention trees?
When the weather turned rain into ice, the leaves failed.

So what? Every year leaves fail. The cycle. Birth to death.
In the night the sound of cannon, and death everywhere.

What did you see?
Next morning, roots against the glass.

Who's talking now and in familiar language? Get real.
What's real is the broken crown. The trunk shattered.

Was that storm worse than others?
Yes and no. The wind's torque twisted open the tree's tibia.

Fool. You're talking about vegetables. Do you love the patio
tomato? The Christmas cactus?
Yes. And the magnolia on the roof, the felled crabapple, the topless
spruce.

- Hilda Raz

[Larry Robinson]

The Street Cleaner

She had a purpose
Cleaning the streets
Some days it was dirt
Some days it was trash
And some days it was
Rose petals
From the funeral marches
Strewn on the road
By insane motheres and fathers
Who lost their sons and daughter
Infants and grand-children
To war

She heard the voices
Which arose from the dead
Bodies never buried

With her broom in hand
She dutifully
Made circles of rose petals
In the quiet places
To honor them
A touch of beauty
She thought
In this time of darknes
Then she moved on
Her palm frond broom in hand
Cleaning

- Corlene Van Sluizer

[Larry Robinson]

Terza Rima

In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can't be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell

How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,

And then flew on, as if towards Paradise.

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn Passage

On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

On the dazzling toddler:
“Like eggplant,” he says,
when you say “Vegetable,”

“Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

glory of grown children’s vigil.
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.

- Elizabeth Alexander

[Larry Robinson]

*Monet Refuses the Operation
*
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.* The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.* Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
*
- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

Praise What Comes

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved
of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

- Jeanne Lohmann

[Larry Robinson]

Gautama Christ

The names of God and especially those of His representative
Who is called Jesus or Christ according to holy books and
someone's mouth
These names have been used, worn out and left
On the shores of rivers of of human lives
Like the empty shells of a mollusk.
However when we touch these sacred but exhausted
Names, these wounded scattered petals
Which have come out of the oceans of love and fear
Something still remains, a sip of water,
A rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.

While the names of God were used
By the best and the worst, by the clean and the dirty
By the white and the black, by bloody murderers
And by victims flaming gold with napalm
While Nixon with his hands
Of Cain blessed those whom he condemned to death,
While fewer and fewer divine footprints were found
on the beach
People began to study colors,
The future of honey, the sign of uranium
They looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities
Of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing
themselves into a fabric
Of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping

What we came across in these blood thirsty times
With their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes
As we weren't able to stop looking
We often stopped to look at the names of God
We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us
Of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers
Those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune
And now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those
ancient people
We feel those smooth substances,
Worn out and used up by good and by evil.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary

For Reverend Theodore Richardson

If Mary came would Mary
Forgive, as Mothers may,
And sad and second Saviour
Furnish us today?

She would not shake her head and leave
This military air,
But ratify a modern hay,
And put her Baby there.

Mary would not punish men—
If Mary came again.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

[Larry Robinson]

What, Friends, Is A Life?

for Gabe Gudding

Killing a chicken for dinner always prompted
A quarrel about who had to do it. Today

You can take tours of virtual slave ships.
Many people are drawn to the dead

On their holidays. Because of its abundance
A large section of Birkenau was named Canada.

You could get good boots there & sometimes
A silk shawl or a jar of pickled herring. But it was

In America that fake birds were first made
To attract native fowl. The most familiar kinds

Of camouflage make one thing appear to be two,
Two things one & so on. Camouflage artists

Make it an arduous challenge to see a figure
On a ground (blending) or to distinguish one

Category of object from another (mimicry).
Less familiar but far more effective is dazzle

Camouflage in which a single thing appears
To be a hodgepodge of disparate components.

At Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the actors say
The audience always pays better attention

When it’s raining. Mother loved the sun,
She said, because its rays felt like ink to her

Fingers. Honestly I don’t understand many
People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying

By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing
Is simply another way of marking time.

- Mark Yakich

[Larry Robinson]

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

- Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Reverse Living

Life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time. All your weekends.
And what do you get at the end of it -
Death - A great reward.
I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first. Get it out of the way.
Then you live 20 years in an old folks home.
You get kicked out when you're too young.
You get a good watch. You go to work.
You work for 40 years until you are young enough to enter college.
You learn to party until you are ready for High School.
You go to High School, Grade School,
You become a little kid.
You play, you have no responsibilities.
You become a little baby.
You go back into the womb.
You spend the last nine months floating
Only to finish off as a gleam in somebodies eye.

- Lynne Vance

[Larry Robinson]

The Hour Glass

It was but twelve months ago that the hour glass that is 2008 was turned. And now we watch in anticipation as the final grains of sand follow one another to end the year.

A man with a long white beard who needs a cane to help him remain on his feet takes the hand of the child in diapers standing on his plump little legs.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” warns the old man, “it passes quickly.”

And a nation down on its luck looks back, shamed by the misdeeds of its president. “We can do what is right!” It screams out to its neighbors around the earth, “we have chosen a leader so different from all of the rest, you will see. You will see!”

And even though it is the dead of winter and the longest and coldest nights of the year are upon us, we nonetheless continue a measured and steady trek toward spring and day by day hope slowly approaches.

Ah yes, the hour glass of 2009 will be turned in a few short hours its top globe filled not so much by the sands of time as the hopes of a people.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila