Desire

Desire

By Ruben Rivera

Originally composed, January 2012

we are what we desire yet

few there are who show or

can that such was never ours

countless grasping hands

have ploughed the virgin soil

in furrows deep as worry and

hollow as the grave declaring

you're nothing without me

and so the self before

it knew itself and since

to that one true thing

to happy here and then

to missing god-shaped

puzzle piece are

someone's handsome profit

until we hurl the plough

upon the cold and smoky

ground and the dead are left

to rot in all those graves

...

Thirty Years

By Ruben Rivera.

Thirty years
and still the best part of my day is coming home to you.
30 years
and still I love you
and you me.
1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1 years
and still the best part of my day is coming home
to you.
XXX years.
That's like 200 in dog years
and God knows how many in rat
and still the best part of my day is coming home
to you.

A Psalm of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

One of the great 19th century American "fireside poets"

whose fairly accessible metered and rhymed poetry 

became widely popular, memorized and recited in schools, 

and as entertainment around the family hearth 

and social gatherings.

 
 A PSALM OF LIFE
What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist

    TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
        Life is but an empty dream! —
    For the soul is dead that slumbers,
        And things are not what they seem.

    Life is real!   Life is earnest!
        And the grave is not its goal;
    Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
        Was not spoken of the soul.

    Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
        Is our destined end or way;
    But to act, that each to-morrow
        Find us farther than to-day.

    Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
        And our hearts, though stout and brave,
    Still, like muffled drums, are beating
        Funeral marches to the grave.

    In the world's broad field of battle,
        In the bivouac of Life,
    Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
        Be a hero in the strife!

    Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
        Let the dead Past bury its dead!
    Act,— act in the living Present!
        Heart within, and God o'erhead!

    Lives of great men all remind us
        We can make our lives sublime,
    And, departing, leave behind us
        Footprints on the sands of time;

    Footprints, that perhaps another,
        Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
    A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
        Seeing, shall take heart again.

    Let us, then, be up and doing,
        With a heart for any fate;
    Still achieving, still pursuing,
        Learn to labor and to wait.

-----------

  

"Life in this world will be full

when we realize the grave is empty."

Ruben Rivera

Answer to a Child's Question

 For Anita:

 Answer to a Child's Question

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,
The linnet, and thrush say, 'I love and I love!'
In the winter they're silent, the wind is so strong;
What it says I don't know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving, all come back together.
Then the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings, and forever sings he--
'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'

------  Photo by Scott Thomas, Flickr

Eleven Poems To Change Your Life

By Ruben Rivera

This year I have come to love poetry. I read poetry, occasionally, before and have even cherished some. But this time it's different. In the past poems inspired me, comforted me, awakened my heart and mind to the extra- in ordinary, provided an unmatched vocality for the deepest suffering, the highest joy -- every experience, emotion and expression imaginable.

The difference is that then I treated poetry more or less the way that many a pastor has said that too many Christians treat the Bible: as a source to find "your fortune." Such a reading of the Bible, as with anything else (history, contemporary social issues, political debates, even established scientific facts and, yes, poetry), lends itself to seeing that which we expect, want, or must have rubber stamped, instead of what we need. And is it not true that sometimes what "we need", may well surprise, disappoint or contradict? Is that not, as we have all heard at one time or another, how we correct our course, grow more humane?

The difference was illustrated to me just yesterday. A book arrived in the mail that my wife had wanted: "Ten Poems to Change Your Life" by Roger Housden, which I found for pennies online. My wife and I are reading some of the poems in the book, along with author commentary. There is one poem by Rumi, the 13th century Persian Muslim poet, mystic, theologian. It is titled "Zero Circle". It starts:

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
   to gather us up...

It is on page 43 and I'm a little frustrated. Everything is high-lighted yellow and underlined, rendering the book cheap-looking and the purpose of high-lighting and underlining useless. The whole book is this way, along with countless stars penned in the margins, scripture citations, quotations from other poets, and personal comments. Now I know why it cost only pennies.

I often make brief notations in books. But I remark to my wife how silly it is to high-light, underline and star everything. As this only cancels out their value of pointing out the point. For now (unless one has a photographic memory) one must re-read everything to find it again.

Then it hit me. When I judged the previous book-owner's actions, I missed the point. And that is the difference from the past: the fact that I saw it at all, let alone so quickly. This person had chomped on this book. I was getting their chewing gum and I didn't like it. But I failed (momentarily, thank God) to see what a beautiful thing was before me. 

There, on page after page, I saw evidence of a lover of poetry, a person hungry for all that "the examined life" has to offer, a person striving after the fullness of a beautifully conceived image of God.

I read the book now, and I no longer see high-lighter and scribbles. I see the colors of someone's life. I see:  

My safety lies in my defenselessness

"It's not about me." Max Lucado

"Your character shouts so loudly in my ears I can't hear what you say." Emerson

Plato said the unexamined life isn't worth living!

There are no ordinary moments.

Passion for living.

And Carpe Diem! on about ten different pages.

Put all those lines together and I actually got a book that should be titled:

Eleven Poems to Change Your Life. 

Be helpless, dumbfounded,

Unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come from grace

   to gather us up...

                 Rumi

"America, America," by Delmore Schwartz

Edmund Kish to his mother: "You have just seen a genius."

Mrs. Kish: "How much money does he make?"

Delmore Schwartz, "The World is a Wedding"

 ---------   

I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it,
the lights, the stars, and the bridges
I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic
-of the peoples' hearts, crossing it
to new America.

I am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope,
acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage
in steerage, strange and estranged
Hence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.

For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the
heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.

It is true but only partly true that a city is a "tyranny of
numbers"
(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and
metaphysical self
After the first two World Wars of the 20th century)

--- This is the city self, looking from window to lighted
window
When the squares and checks of faintly yellow light
Shine at night, upon a huge dim board and slab-like tombs,
Hiding many lives. It is the city consciousness
Which sees and says: more: more and more: always more.

Delmore Schwartz

"Gyroscope," by Ted Kooser

I place this within the first order
of wonders: a ten-year-old girl
alone on a sunny, glassed-in porch
in February, the world beyond
the windows slowly tipping forward
into spring, her thin arms held out
in the sleepwalker pose, and pinched
and stretched between her fingers,
a length of common grocery twine
upon which smoothly spins and leans
one of the smaller worlds we each
at one time learn to master, the last
to balance so lightly in our hands.

---- 
Ted Kooser, American Poet Laureate (2004-2006). 
This poem appeared in his collection "Delights
and Shawdows," for which he won the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry in 2005.

"The Sun" by Mary Oliver

Dear friends,
I try my best to post once a week, but I have been busy with other writing that is for publication. However, I did not want to skip a post, so I am for the first time including a small item not written by me. It is a short poem by the wonderful (and mercifully accessible) Mary Oliver. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Please feel free to comment on how she speaks to you.

Ruben
===========

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
========