November 30, 2021 – 10:28 pm
KEEPING OUR SMALL BOAT AFLOAT So many blessings have been given to us During the first distribution of light, that we are Admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief. Don’t expect us to appreciate creation or to Avoid mistakes. Each of us is a latecomer To the earth, picking up wood for the fire. […]
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November 28, 2021 – 9:33 pm
Where will we find another like him? Tony Hoagland from The Village Troublemaker: Robert Bly and American Poetry in The American Poetry Review, September/October, 2011 The Pistachio Nut God crouches at night over a single pistachio. The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child. […]
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This Impossible Math – The Grace and Rightness You Were Minus the Wrong You Were, Equals, What? I grieve to speak of love and yet not love as I should. I ask forgiveness of the many I have wounded And of the many I have passed without seeing their wounds. Pray for me, my brother […]
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April 25, 2016 – 12:36 pm
Walking on the Shore in Late August I look out over the muddy lake. All at once I see a fin rise, what alertness! All my brain power pours toward that spot on the water. How we long for a bit of consciousness to appear above the water! Now I notice what I have never […]
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What does refusal look like? Refusal to look at our shadow side, our rejected aspects, good and bad; and/or refusal to live on the borderlands of our lives, and past them, into our greatest fullness? American poet Robert Bly (1926 – ) symbolizes this or these refusals, strikingly in this poem: And the toe of […]
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A merganser is clucking in front of me in a little bay near our cabin on Cortes Island, B.C. I call it clucking but it sounds also like little honks. So much my ear and mouth cannot translate. Oh! This untranslatable world. Even a wing. A prayer. These mysteries that take flight- impossible the realities […]
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AND WHAT IF AFTER And what if after so many words the word itself doesn’t survive! And what if after so many wings of birds the stopped bird doesn’t survive! It would be better then, really, if it were all swallowed up, and let’s end it! To have been born only to live off […]
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Throw Yourself Like Seed Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit; sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate that brushes your heel as it turns going by, the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant. Now you are only giving food to that final pain which […]
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Why I Am Happy Now has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent […]
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April 19, 2012 – 12:06 am
Weakness Old mare whose eyes are like cracked marbles, drools blood in her mash, shivers in her jute blanket . My father hates weakness worse than hail; in the morning without haste he will shoot her in the ear, once, shovel her under in the north pasture. Tonight leaving the stables, he stands […]
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