Give to Others What You Would Receive

Smilegiving

The Collected Poems

Rob Chavez

A poem, to my mind, is a lamp handed from one set of hands to another, still warm. It only does its work in the passing.

Read them slowly. Read them aloud if you can. And when one of them moves you, hand it on.

The poems are gathered here in five movements — a single journey from the doorway, through the honest dark, out into the widening world, down to the quiet center, and home again to you.

MOVEMENT I

The Doorway

Welcome, and the whole of it, gently.

  1. 1The Book For Giving — One for Everyone
  2. 2Yesmile — an affirmative way of life
  3. 3One Open Hand
  4. 4Looping Home
  5. 5The Great Compassion
MOVEMENT II

The Honest Dark

The turn toward doubt, the bare table, the rut — and the turning.

  1. 6Deserving It All
  2. 7Ever Beginning
  3. 8Different than Before
  4. 9Wing Sleep
MOVEMENT III

The Widening

Outward — to neighbor, to home, to the table, to the country.

  1. 10I’m Never Free By Myself
  2. 11Co-Creator Conspiracy
  3. 12Family Home
  4. 13Food For God
  5. 14The Long Table — America at 250
  6. 15The Second He Comes — a reply to Yeats
MOVEMENT IV

The Quiet Center

The still point — time, the Tao, the mystics’ now.

  1. 16Quantum Understanding
  2. 17Miracles Breathe Free
  3. 18Tao Jones
  4. 19Peaced Together
  5. 20Way to Go
MOVEMENT V

The Turn Toward You

Lineage, gratitude, the handing-on — and the bow.

  1. 21Hippie Dreams
  2. 22Positively 4th Grade
  3. 23Get Shown the Light
  4. A poem and its tuning, 35 years apart:

    24Light the Way — the 1991 original 25Still Lighting the Way — a tuning, 2026
  5. 26Paradise for Moriarty
  6. 27What You Came ForThe Crown
  7. 28Jesus SmiledCornerstone
  8. 29The GiftThe Bow

From the Vault

Early, private, experimental pieces — kept and loved, set a little apart from the main journey.

  1. No Time At All / All The Time
  2. Here for You
  3. The Sleep Walk — a dream interlude
  4. The book begins…