the poetry zendo: every morning brings another chance

taylor marie mccormick

the crows have come today

to count and measure the wounds of the earth

these wounds are large and numerous

and the crows announce them one by one

I am their witness

***

lazy man I never put my hoses away

they lay wherever I drop them

I never bother to remember where either

I have spent my life walking around

looking for the far end of hoses

I imagine finches watching me or raccoons

all of them thinking me a fool—

stupid man! he should put the hoses away!

well, to hell with them all

I don’t have feathers or fur

and I don’t go around judging people

with poems on their minds

***

the advertisement was for a rustic cabin for sale

looking at the photograph,

I decided that rustic must mean beat all to hell.

looking down at this aging body

One can see that I must be a rustic poet

and then

from somewhere outside of my also-rustic house

a dog began to bark

it barked for a very long time

***

because we are human we think

we must endeavor to be perfect

how foolish

it is our perfect imperfections

that makes us human

we suffer, we sweat, we love

so just love yourself anyway

right now

***

at dusk the sun dies

every morning the sun is then reborn

and it is that every morning brings another chance

for you and I to be better people

to grow to learn to love

it’s easy when the sun rises tomorrow

just wake up and open your heart

***

silence is a blessing the perfect emptiness

that binds you to the void embrace it

raise up your arms and give thanks for silence

give thanks for the vast emptiness of the void

poems by james lee jobe

previously in medusa's kitchen

dan mountford

"The weight of the world is love."

-Allen Ginsberg

***

"If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both." 

-Bodhidharma

***

"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible."

-Francis of Assisi

***

"Nature is not a place to visit. It is home."

-Gary Snyder

WHY I AM HAPPY

--William Stafford, 1914-1993

Now has come an easy time. I let it
roll. Thetre is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind come 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 spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.