Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Early Spring


Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming)

[Larry Robinson]

For the Orchard

I want to tell you about the apple orchard.
How in the spring, when I come up over the rise,
blossom clouds soften the sky with a whisper.
How on summer afternoons I swim carelessly
through green shade and shards of light.
How autumn fills me ripe with desire,
and I devour stolen fruit as I walk.
How the winter horizon is sharpened at night
with unadorned branches pinned to stars.

This April day I’ll tell you
how I drew the trees as they lay felled.
Trunks, connected or not by shred of bark,
lay on stumps ridged by saw tooth.
Limbs capsized into impossible tangles
laced with the season’s new growth.
Here and there, among the terrible beauty,
I witnessed, first and last, the blossoming.

- Christine Walker

[Lilith Rogers]

Just last week
as I was driving past the orchards
all budding open in spring
I passed one on the south end of Pleasant Hill Rd
all chopped down and lying in ruins
and I cried.

Lilith

For the Orchard

I want to tell you about the apple orchard.
How in the spring, when I come up over the rise,
blossom clouds soften the sky with a whisper.
How on summer afternoons I swim carelessly
through green shade and shards of light.
How autumn fills me ripe with desire,
and I devour stolen fruit as I walk.
How the winter horizon is sharpened at night
with unadorned branches pinned to stars.

This April day I’ll tell you
how I drew the trees as they lay felled.
Trunks, connected or not by shred of bark,
lay on stumps ridged by saw tooth.
Limbs capsized into impossible tangles
laced with the season’s new growth.
Here and there, among the terrible beauty,
I witnessed, first and last, the blossoming.

- Christine Walker

[Larry Robinson]

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great

Paschal candle of the sun.
Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britains.

Her totem the randy bunny.
Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays
Are stained by syllables of thunder
And Woden's frenzy.

O my fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery—
May they pass over us, the old

Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers,
Embodiments. Egg-hunt,
Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted
Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter

Compass of martyrdom,
Ground-up apples and walnuts
In sweet wine to embody mortar
Of affliction, babies for bricks.

Legible traces of the species
That devises the angel of death
Sailing over our doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

Easter Morning In Wales

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
Neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like broken nets.

Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
If I am really seeing, or dreaming,
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

- Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

- Juan Ramon Jimenez

[Larry Robinson]

Saint Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
Put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessing of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the
hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken
heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the
fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

- Galway Kinnell

[Larry Robinson]

Close To The Road

Close to the road we sit down one day.
Now our life amounts to time, and our sole concern
the attitudes of despair we adopt
while we wait. But She will not fail to arrive.

- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

[RexCasteel]

Only 4 lines - this I can handle. A mere 35 words!

And what if I spent as much time contemplating "our sole concern..." as I did counting those words?

I counted them twice, you know. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn't be embarrassed by an inaccuracy.

And men - "us men" - always seem to be writing about "She."

I'm sure there is a reason for this. I'm sure this is highly significant...

- Rex

Close To The Road

Close to the road we sit down one day.
Now our life amounts to time, and our sole concern
the attitudes of despair we adopt
while we wait. But She will not fail to arrive.

- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

Strut Zones

Face east -
Legs folded, lids closed, palms open.
Breathe in, breathe out,
Listen.
Hear a low vibration of bold feathers fanned in a wide half circle, Thrumming,
Followed by a sharp stop and an eerie bass note.
The tom struts slowly, majestically,
Preened and postured he holds open his serious display,
A precision bouquet of thousands of feathers.
Seductive.
Each hollow shaft quivers, placed exactly,
In specific design, in specific order.
This brilliant sweep of florescence,
Flutters for his Jenny’s.
Revealing-- like cards of a winning hand splayed for examination.
Tempting-- like an unfolded fan exposing the look of “come hither”.
Then scarlet and cobalt infusions surround his face,
His featherless head,
Highlighting dewlap or wattle,
Colorizing caruncles.
An odd proboscis begins to swell
Then wiggles and dangles,
Retracts and elongates.
All in celebration of promiscuity.
He yelps, then clucks, then cackles.
She putts, then hoots, then hisses.
Each morning their yodels of gobbles echo from the tree tops,
Where they sit,
Feathers tucked, eyes closed, necks thrust out and up.
Prayers of thanksgiving are offered to what must surely be
An irreverent,
A most excessive,
And clearly magnificent god.
I sit, face east,
Legs folded, lids closed, palms open.
I practice gobbling.

- Colleen Werner

[Larry Robinson]

Clouds
*
All afternoon, Sir,
your ambassadors have been turning
into lakes and rivers.
At first they were just clouds, like any other.
Then they broke open.* This is, I suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves
*
the purpose.* I go on, soaked through, my hair
slicked back;
like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.
*
- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Apple Orchard

Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(translatied by Albert Ernest Flemming)

[Larry Robinson]

The Orchard

Three massacres have I witnessed and what can I say? Our older
one-legged cousins lie mutilated and silent, sprawled on dusty face.

Yet I hear them.
I hear them.
I hear them
uprooted, weeping, bleeding.
For one hundred years they faithfully delivered their quenching fruit.
Commit genocide on the unsuspecting? Not the bulldozer driver repeatedly backing into crunching trees - his kids need clothing and feeding. Neither the compadres hammering stakes and setting irrigation for the new cash crop - they have rent to pay, and obligations back home. Nor the owners, who believe a coastal touch of fog, perfect for these grapes, will soon play upon our lips.

- Raphael Block

[Larry Robinson]

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then as I had before that life
is no passing memory of what has been,
nor the remaining pages in a book waiting
to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold
It is the heart after years of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert, fallen to his knees
before the lit bush.
It is the man, throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished, opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

This will be my last poetry post until May 14. I apologize for the interruption of the stream. Blessings to you all.
Larry


The Source

There in the fringe of trees between
the upper field and the edge of the one
below it that runs above the valley
one time I heard in the early
days of summer the clear ringing
six notes that I knew were the opening
of the Fingal's Cave Overture
I heard them again and again that year
and the next summer and the year
afterward those six descending
notes the same for all the changing
in my own life since the last time
I had heard them fall past me from
the bright air in the morning of a bird
and I believed that what I had heard
would always be there if I came again
to be overtaken by that season
in that place after the winter
and I would wonder again whether
Mendelssohn really had heard them somewhere
far to the north that many years ago
looking up from his youth to listen to
those six notes of an ancestor
spilling over from a presence neither
water nor human that led to the cave
in his mind the fluted cliffs and the wave
going out and the falling water
he thought those notes could be the music for
Mendelssohn is gone and Fingal is gone
all but his name for a cave and for one
piece of music and the black-capped warbler
as we called that bird that I remember
singing there those notes descending
from the age of the ice dripping
I have not heard again this year can it
be gone then will I not hear it
from now on will the overture begin
for a time and all those who listen
feel that falling in them but as always
without knowing what they recognize

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

I am not I

I am not I. I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

- Juan Ramón Jiménez

[Larry Robinson]

Any fool Can Get Into An Ocean

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What's true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor's seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you've tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That's when the fun starts
Unless you're a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You'll drown, dear. You'll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What's true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

- Jack Spicer

[Larry Robinson]

Prayer In April


-- For Millie and Orrin

And can there still be any doubt when just this morning,


right as we clamored off to school,


in the driveway, the bird--


that startled baby bird...


He was so frightened he'd lost his voice;


his little feather head became more yellow


with his quivering.


We three took turns holding him.


The complicity of our awe


is what strikes me now


and I hope I'll always remember it:


how we dropped to our knees,


how we took turns cradling him;


how, the moment that he flew


we lost our voices, too.

- Lisa Starr


Lisa Starr is Rhode Island’s poet laureate as well as an inn-keeper, mother, and basketball coach. As Poet Laureate, Starr is generating a statewide poetry pen-pal system between student and elderly writing circles, and has established poetry circles in hospitals, homeless shelters, the state prison, and agencies for children with severe mental and physical disabilities. Her other collections of poetry are Days of Dogs and Driftwood and This Place Here.

[Larry Robinson]

Beginning With Me

The war
that was raging inside me
has ceased.

Is this the path
that opens all
to peace?

One by One
we lay down the arms
we bear against ourselves

and embrace life.

- Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

Random Love

Standing alone
swaying with the day's residue
under the gaudy white chandelier
hoping to spy a friend for company
before the concert when a very
old man stooped over his cane
walks right up to me and asks,
‘are you the wild one?’

I pause with this gesture
of inquiry, join him like a dream
and reply, ‘yes, I am one of them,
there are many of us’
his eyes aglow and I declare
‘I am she.’

In a spontaneous moment of certainty
he looks directly into my eyes
and says, ‘I love you completely!’
He turns and paddles off to the cookie counter
as I murmur, ‘I love you too.’

I know he didn’t hear me
swallowed in a rapture all his own
I fumble in my coat pocket
for my ticket
the lights flicker for concert signal
and I shake my head
hold my heart
for this random love.

- Lizbeth Hamlin

[Larry Robinson]

Think of Others

As you prepare your breakfast – think of others.
Don’t forget to feed the pigeons.
As you conduct your wars – think of others.
Don’t forget those who want peace.
As you pay your water bill – think of others.
Think of those who only have clouds to drink from.
As you go home, your own home – think of others
– don’t forget those who live in tents.
As you sleep and count the planets, think of others
– there are people who have no place to sleep.
As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others
– those who have lost their right to speak.
And as you think of distant others
– think of yourself and say “I wish I were a candle in the darkness.”

- Mahmoud Darwish

[Larry Robinson]

Heat and Light

Terrible things have happened.
So many ruptures and losses...
and we, who cannot quite register,
let alone measure
impact and consequence,
bifurcating veins and roots
on this and that path,
put our hands to our heads
and open our mouths to scream
like the stand-in for Everyman
in Munch’s raw picture.

Even the Centenarian cherry tree is confused,
holding her mango saffron leaves
that in other years she readily released.
Fallen, brittle and brown,
they collected in little heaps
that rose and fell,
scuttering in a stiff winter wind.
This year’s leaves still flutter,
still veil her weathered limbs.

And I have seen the foolish tulips
poking through the hardening ground
and rash acacia beginning to bud in frost.
What can the rhubarb be thinking,
presenting enough stalks for a pie
in December?
The marigolds that bloomed
with fennel and lettuce
are still here.

In my mind's eye, marigolds signify
the suchness of things,
the way everything everywhere
is in season, in harmony
before the rhythms of day
and the rhythms of night
were confounded by artificial light.

Plundered, pillaged, sacked,
spirited away...
the eternal round,
the cycles and seasons.
Who patiently waits for May
for asparagus and strawberries?
Who sleeps at dusk
and wakes at dawn anymore?

There is a breach in the order of things
And all the cracks, fractures and gashes
have left absence in my heart
and a depression in my mind.

What awaits us at the close
of the Calendar?
What, when solar storms roar?
Better to slip through the bottle neck,
take a wooded road at the fork.
Untangle the knot, unwind the skein,
carry pistil and stamen and seed.

Tonight,
the season of falling leaves
gives way to winter-tide...
time to hibernate,
to dream.
In the shelter of sleep,
in the welter of repair
in the still time of remembering,
embers await rekindling.
Who will bring the wood
and who will light the fire?

- Carla Steinberg

[Larry Robinson]

Quiet

I love when it is quiet
enough to hear the vase with water
calling out for flowers.

Enough to hear my coffee, half-made,
calling for cream and sugar
while I head outside with clippers.

Enough to hear the vase, now with flowers
arranged, saying
you can see that this was done with
one hand making coffee.

The coffee saying
you can taste, can’t you, that
I was made
with one hand still on the clippers.

And still, for today, allowing
that while
not of one piece,

this is the coffee I will drink,
and the flowers which will
grace
our table.

- Scott O'Brien

[Bird Watcher]

This is also with gratitude, but I need to ask, as I've seen Larry post the poet's name before, is this the Sebastopol Scott O'Brien? Singer/songwriter Scott O'Brien? Scott, your works are wonderful. Thank you for these gifts. Thank you to Larry for giving us access to beautiful poetry on a daily basis.

[Larry Robinson]

Translating The Book of Serenity in Santa Fe

I dreamed I found a lost poem of Stanley Kunitz
on the cover of an old book
with a lot of white space and black text at angles.
In the dream I was married and I read the poem aloud over the table at the meal.
It was about a person who got an interview with God and spoke their question across
the swirl of hyperspace and night.

The person said, "What does it all mean, all the…and you… grief… and wanting impossible things?"—the question standing for other questions such as:
 the snow blossoms on the cotton wood trees
 and the thousands of snow geese falling out of the twilight in stages
 while the great sandhill cranes glide underneath,
 each to a precise place in the water shining
 with the last glow of sunset at Bosque del Apache,

but the translator is holding in memory many things such as
 the lost papyri of the Phoenicians
 and the place where the polar bears are leaving for

so in the language that crosses the turbulent dark,
only two words remain:
the question arrives as, “The dog?”

God is interested and tries, with the means at hand,
to show the whole pattern—
the response travels back through immensity and comes out, “Woof.”
“Woof,” says God, “Woof.”

and that will have to do.

My wife was not convinced by the poem,
but when I woke up it was still here
in my chest,
though most of the words could not cross over into waking.

- John Tarrant

[Larry Robinson]

I am off today for a week's retreat so this will be my last poem until May 30. Again, I must apologize for the interruption of service.
Larry

A Thousand Dogs

Go you your inner kennel
Where a thousand dogs
With soft eyes
Lick at the bars
And break your heart

Go ahead
Adopt the long eared generosity
You kept caged so long

Bring home the spontaneous joy
That some ancient loss
Abandoned by the side of a lonely road

Make a soft bed in your home
For the ragged bones
Of the weary hound
Of who you really are

There are no papers to fill out
And no shots required

Just a thousand dogs
To hitch to your sled
And pull you all the way home

- Warren Peace
(Translated from Canine by Brian Narelle)

[Larry Robinson]

I Think Continually of Those

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

- Stephen Spender

[Larry Robinson]

A Sunset of the City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

[Larry Robinson]

Gratitude

What did you notice?

The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;
the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

What did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;
the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;
the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the
pale green wand;
at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid
beauty of the flowers;
then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,
her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue, her
recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her
sturdy legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;
the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;
the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;
the tall, blank banks of sand;
the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;
the sea and its triangles;
the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green breast of the hummingbird;
the eye of the pond;
the wet face of the lily;
the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;
the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;
the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve
of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

- Mary Oliver