Red Flower
Red Flower
The red flower cannot help it
not the orange or yellow
being there for bee or bird
or me just as they are
©
Bob Schwartz
Category: Poetry
November 26, 2018
November 23, 2018
Wrestling with Yourself
The Action Bible, illustrated by Sergio Cariello (Genesis 32.24–32)
Jacob Wrestles All Night with an Angel or with God
Yaakov is left alone, and a man wrestles
With him until daybreak.
When the man sees he has not won against Yaakov,
He strikes him on the hip socket,
And as he wrestles with him
Yaakov’s hip comes out of joint.
Then he says, “Let me go. Dawn is breaking.”
But Yaakov says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
So he tells him, “What is your name?”
And he answers, “Yaakov.”
And he says, “You shall no longer be called Yaakov, but Yisrael,
For you have fought with God and men
And you have won.”
And Yaakov tells him, saying, “Please tell me your name.”
But he says, “Why are you after my name?”
And there he blesses him.
And Yaakov names the place Penuel, saying,
“I have seen God face to face and I am alive.”
The sun rises over them
But Yaakov is limping because of his hip.
Therefore, the children of Yisrael
Do not eat the thigh muscle of the hip
Because he (the nameless) struck Yaakov
On the socket of his hip.
Willis Barnstone, Poets of the Bible
November 21, 2018
The People, Yes: Where to? what next?
“The People, Yes, an epic prose-poem, is in many ways the culmination of Carl Sandburg’s work as a poet and is believed by Lilian Sandburg to be his favorite work. He crafted it over an eight-year period, fusing the American vernacular with the details of history and contemporary events….Believing that economic inequity lay at the root of all social injustice, from labor conflict to racial and civil strife, he responded to the economic and social upheavals of the 1930s with The People, Yes.”
Carl Sandburg Home, National Parks Service
“Sandburg had a subject—and the subject was belief in man.”
Archibald MacLeish at the Carl Sandburg Memorial
The People, Yes
107
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback.
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”
The people is a tragic and comic two-face:
hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twisting
to moan with a gargoyle mouth: “They
buy me and sell me . . . it’s a game . . .
sometime I’ll break loose . . .”
Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched
Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prisms of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
The People, Yes
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
October 13, 2018
Dreams
Dreams
In dreams
those who can’t walk walk
those who walk fly
the long lost is found
the precious disappears
hearts are broken and mended
without reason.
Is the night different from day
sleep from wake?
All and nothing
are possible.
©
October 3, 2018
Front Yard Birds, Back Yard Birds
Front Yard Birds, Back Yard Birds
Sitting between
open window and open window
I hear the birds articulate and awake
sounding sweet, sometimes shrill,
and wise by nature.
They do not compete or argue
and I in the middle
listen and learn not to talk back.
©
September 14, 2018
Key
Key
When you leave take the key
even for a few steps out the front door
out the back.
What if the door locks behind you?
Even if there’s someone inside
to hear you knocking pounding
ringing calling.
What if she locks it
not knowing where you are?
What if she needs help
and you are locked out helpless?
What if she knows and decides
that this trip to the trash
should be your last?
Only a few possibilities
there are more
prevented by that key in pocket.
One man’s prudence
built on irrefutable logic
is an observer’s key to personality.
What of it?
Analysis is theory
being locked out an inconvenient fact.
Take the key.
September 2, 2018
Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much With Us
The World Is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Note:
We are the people of more or all.
We have never before been able to have so many different things and to tell so many different people about so many different things. We have never been able to want so many different things and to hear from so many people about so many different things. Things include not only material, but events, experiences and ideas.
We may try to have, want, say, hear it all, or as much as possible. We may believe that we are the fortunate beneficiaries of living in this unprecedented situation, and that even the occasional imbalance is outweighed by finally being the people of more or all. Anyway, we are just taking advantage of inevitable progress, are we not? Why shouldn’t just a hint about the next iPhone be a milestone in our lives, making it a major global news story?
Writing more than two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth was in a long line of those who have suggested—begged—that we get our priorities in order and look for relief from a condition we don’t even know we are suffering from. His prescription was Nature, which stands in more broadly for consciousness of the deep essence of existence. We can have more or all, already may have more or all, if we look in the right places.
August 20, 2018
Cactus Flower
Cactus Flower ©
Cactus Flower
The rare rains have come and gone.
Only in the first hours of the dry sun day
splendid petals unfold then hide.
Catch them capture them
with words brush or camera?
We are as arrogant and grateful
as they are beautiful.
©
Organ Pipe Flowers ©
August 10, 2018
For a While
For a While
After the desert heat the dusk
with low growl whisper of thunder then
the roar and the cracked sky
emptying the rain.
Every night it will be this way
for a while.
Wall shaking and roof patter
call me out to see what the
matter it is.
Sound light and blessed water
and when I stand skin to air feel
a trickle of cool breeze streaming my way
for a while.
©
August 8, 2018
Border
Border
The border of melancholy and joy
is the color of washed out orange gray
late sunset in lingering heat.
The playlist alternates
requited longing to despair
with no choice.
©
Bob Schwartz 