A Warning To My Readers

Do not think me gentle Because I speak in praise Of gentleness, or elegant Because I honor the grace That keeps this world. I am A man crude as any, Gross of speech, intolerant,

Ripening

The longer we are together The larger death grows around us. How many we know by now Who are dead! We, who were young, Now count the cost of having been. And yet as

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, Vacation with pay. Want more Of everything ready-made. Be afraid To know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not

Do not be ashamed

You will be walking some night In the comfortable dark of your yard And suddenly a great light will shine Round about you, and behind you Will be a wall you never saw before.

In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams

I. The poem is important, but Not more than the people Whose survival it serves, One of the necessities, so they may Speak what is true, and have The patience for beauty: the weighted

Sabbaths 2001

I He wakes in darkness. All around Are sounds of stones shifting, locks Unlocking. As if some one had lifted Away a great weight, light Falls on him. He has been asleep or simply

The Man Born to Farming

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, Whose hands reach into the ground and sprout To him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death Yearly, and comes

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do We have come our real work, And that when we no longer know which way to go We have come to our
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