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The Supple Deer
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don't know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
- Jane Hirshfield
Having Come This Far
I've been through what my through was to be
I did what I could and couldn't
I was never sure how I would get there
I nourished an ardor for thresholds
for stepping stones and for ladders
I discovered detour and ditch
I swam in the high tides of greed
I built sandcastles to house my dreams
I survived the sunburns of love
No longer do I hunt for targets
I've climbed all the summits I need to
and I've eaten my share of lotus
Now I give praise and thanks
for what could not be avoided
and for every foolhardy choice
I cherish my wounds and their cures
and the sweet enervations of bliss
My book is an open life
I wave goodbye to the absolutes
and send my regards to infinity
I'd rather be blithe than correct
Until something transcendent turns up
I splash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused.
- James Broughton
Into These Knots
Tell us how the soul is bound and bent
into these knots, and whether any ever
frees itself from such imprisonment.
—Canto XII, Inferno
I say, Without a God there is no hell.
There’s only this—. She rustles for her keys.
The apple tree sheds petal after petal.
She says, Let’s take you to the hospital.
The petals spin like sparks. I close my eyes
and say, Without a God there is no hell,
and there is only this. It’s just as well.
The lawn is red and white. She asks, Who says?
How do you know? The wind fells every petal.
She says, Let’s take you to the hospital.
I cannot breathe. I cannot tell her, Yes—.
Because without a God there is no hell,
as she whispers, Talk to me, I know I will
clamber—but not toward heaven, toward the sky,
eyes winking behind petal after petal.
The rope-burnt bark will flake away and fall.
Knot on my neck, the rest would be so easy:
I’ll pray, Without a God there is no hell,
then slip through petals—through petal after petal.
- Ashley Anna McHugh
The Sign in My Father's Hands
- for Frank Espada
The beer company
did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,
so my father joined the picket line
at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,
amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.
But the cops brandished nightsticks
and handcuffs to protect the beer,
and my father disappeared.
In 1964, I had never tasted beer,
and no one told me about the picket signs
torn in two by the cops of brewery.
I knew what dead was: dead was a cat
overrun with parasites and dumped
in the hallway incinerator.
I knew my father was dead.
I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy
who did not hear the question in school.
I sat studying his framed photograph
like a mirror, my darker face.
Days later, he appeared in the doorway
grinning with his gilded tooth.
Not dead, though I would come to learn
that sometimes Puerto Ricans die
in jail, with bruises no one can explain
swelling their eyes shut.
I would learn too that “boycott”
is not a boy’s haircut,
that I could sketch a picket line
on the blank side of a leaflet.
That day my father returned
from the netherworld
easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,
and the brewery cops could only watch
in drunken disappointment.
I searched my father’s hands
for a sign of the miracle.
- Martin Espada
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
- Wallace Stevens
Hatred
See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape -
our century's hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.
It's not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.
One religion or another -
whatever gets it ready, in position.
One fatherland or another -
whatever helps it get a running start.
Justice also works well at the outset
until hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred. Hatred.
Its face twisted in a grimace
of erotic ecstasy.
Oh these other feelings,
listless weaklings.
Since when does brotherhood
draw crowds?
Has compassion
ever finished first?
Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?
Only hatred has just what it takes.
Gifted, diligent, hard working.
Need we mention all the songs it has composed?
All the pages it has added to our history books?
All the human carpets it has spread
over countless city squares and football fields?
Let's face it:
it knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins
and a certain bawdy humor to be found
in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.
Hatred is a master of contrast -
between explosion and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.
It's always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it's blind. Blind?
It has a sniper's keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.
- Wislawa Szymborska
Inclination
One's throat must be like a garden
And one's eyes like windows
through which love passes;
And one's stature
Must be like a tree
that rises out of rocks;
And poetry must be like a singing bird,
Perching on the highest branch of a tree,
Breaking the heavy silence of the world.
- Hamid Reza Rahimi
Overland to the Islands
Let's go—much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard. The
Mexican light on a day that
‘smells like autumn in Connecticut’
makes iris ripples on his
black gleaming fur—and that too
is as one would desire—a radiance
consorting with the dance.
Under his feet
rocks and mud, his imagination, sniffing,
engaged in its perceptions—dancing
edgeways, there's nothing
the dog disdains on his way,
nevertheless he
keeps moving, changing
pace and approach but
not direction—‘every step an arrival.’
- Denise Levertov
An Affirming Flame
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
- W.H. Auden
Listening
You wept in your mother’s arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
Listening to your sobs,
I was resolved against my will
to do well by us
and so I said, without thinking,
in great panic, To do wrong
in one’s own judgment,
though others thrive by it,
is the right road to blessedness.
Not to submit to error
is in itself wrong
and pride.
Standing beside you,
I took an oath
to make your life simpler
by complicating mine
and what I always thought
would happen did: I was lifted up in joy.
- David Ignatow
How Beautiful It Is
It flows out of mystery into mystery: there is no beginning—
How could there be? And no end—how could there be?
The stars shine in the sky like the spray of a wave
Rushing to meet no shore, and the great music
Blares on forever, but to us very soon
It will be blind. Not we, nor our children nor the human race
Are destined to live forever, the breath will fail,
The eyes will break—perhaps of our own explosive vile
Vented upon each other—or a stingy peace
Makes parents fools—but far greater witnesses
Will take our places. It is only a little planet
But how beautiful it is.
- Robinson Jeffers
The Old Interior Angel
Young, male and
immortal as I was,
I stopped at the first sight
of that broken bridge.
The taut cables snapped
and the bridge planks
concertina-ed
into a crazy jumble
over the drop,
four hundred feet
to the craggy
stream.
I sat and watched
the wind shiver
on the broken planks,
as if by looking hard
and long enough
the life-line
might spontaneously
repair itself
-- but watched in vain.
An hour I sat
in the clear silence,
checking each
involuntary movement
of the body toward
that trembling
bridge
with a fearful mind,
and an emphatic
shake of the head.
Finally, facing defeat
and about to go back
the way I came
to meet the others.
Three days round
by another pass.
Enter the old mountain woman
with her stooped gait,
her dark clothes
and her dung basket
clasped to her back.
Small feet shuffling
for the precious
gold-brown
fuel for cooking food.
Intent on the ground
she glimpsed my feet
and looking up
Said "Namaste"
"I greet the God in you"
the last syllable
held like a song.
I inclined my head
and clasped my hands
to reply, but
before I could look up
she turned her lined face
and went straight across
that shivering chaos
of wood
and broken steel
in one movement.
One day the hero
sits down,
afraid to take
another step,
and the old interior angel
limps slowly in
with her no-nonsense
compassion
and her old secret
and goes ahead.
"Namaste"
you say
and follow.
- David Whyte
When Your Ship
When your ship, long moored in harbor
gives you the illusion of being a house,
put out to sea.
Save your boat’s journeying soul,
and your own pilgrim soul,
cost what it may.
- Helder Camara
Animal Is Spiritual
she calls out in a loud bark
from her doorstep as she sees me walk her way,
still halfway up the block. It’s Nika,
the German Shepherd
who greets and licks everyone,
her slow, arthritic walk
and coat worn bare
to the black skin of her back, sign
of the sloughing off of the flesh.
I try to understand
what she means by this.
Animal is Spiritual,
she barks again and again, and as I approach
she walks out to the street,
does not look for traffic,
crosses to my side and waits for me.
She nuzzles my pant leg, I pet her and say,
You have a point—
the survival advantage of softened interpersonal boundaries
among kin in social animals could well drive a pleasure response
that might be conditioned by the touch of a hand, the nave of a
church, or a voice howling a hymn to the moon.
She licks my cool hand with her warm tongue.
But surely you would admit,
I go on,
the Animal embraces more
than the Spiritual and the Spiritual may well embrace more
than the Animal.
She looks up at me as if I have lost my mind.
I can read it in her eyes: Animal is Spiritual.
But then, what can I expect of anyone
with the limited symbolic capacity
of a Canis familiaris?
And I am embarrassed
to have even talked with her.
I take her by the collar back to her doormat,
tell her to be a good
spiritual dog and stay on her
side of the street. I go on with my walk.
At the end of the block I turn to see
a truck and a car stop and she
in the middle of the road,
as if she does not care
if she lives or dies. The drivers gesture,
but she pays them no mind. She just looks at me
with those eyes again—I,
another animal, a fifty-eight-year-old biped,
in the middle of the street, yelling,
Oh saint among dogs,
please get out of the road!
I, who still don’t know what
Animal is, what
Spiritual is.
- Len Anderson
To die singing!
To die singing! To pass into death through song!
I can think of no better way to die.
Let it be beautiful when I sing the last song.
Let it be day.
I would stand with my two feet singing,
I would look upward with my eyes singing,
I would have the winds envelop my body,
I would have the sun to shine upon my body,
Let it be beautiful when you would slay me,
(Thou wouldst)
O Shining One,
Let it be day when I sing the last song.
- Thomas Aquinas
(From 'Adore te devote')
Sonnet
The stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall
About a dreaming garden still and sweet,
I hear the unseen bats above me bleat
Among the ghostly moths their hunting call,
And twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl.
Now for a chamber dim, a pillow meet
For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet,
Cool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall
With poppies strewn where sleep that is so dear
With magic sponge can wipe away an hour
Or twelve and make them naught. Why not a year,
Why could a man not loiter in that bower
Until a thousand painless cycles wore,
And then—what if it held him evermore?
- C.S. Lewis
For a New Beginning
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling your emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young agin with energy and dream,
A path of plentitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
- John O'Donohue
Life in a Body
Francis, who never intended
To be a saint, called his "Brother Ass",
An affectionate name for the beast
That houses our hearts and all the muscle, tissue,
Sinew and joints that grow drier and older,
Like late-summer grass, every day.
"I stretch every morning before
I get out of bed." She throws one leg
Over the other, by way of demonstration
And she is limber as her words
Are not, coming from vocal cords
Dry and salty as the Sonoran Desert
At the Sea of Cortez. My grandmother,
That same ninety-something years old,
Fell and broke a hip at sixty.
My mother, sixty-something then, tells
Me the story—an old woman as limber
As I am—all of twenty-something.
So I stretch and keep
Stretching until I reach
Central America, then east to Europe.
- Rebecca del Rio
Touched by An Angel
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
- Maya Angelou
Becoming
Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.
- Jim Harrison
Moral Proverbs and Folks Songs
(The Countryside of Castile)
1
I love Jesus, who said to us:
Heaven and earth will pass away.
When heaven and earth have passed away,
my word will remain.
What was your word, Jesus"
Love? Affection? Forgiveness?
All your words were
one word: Wakeup.
2
It is good know that glasses
are to drink from;
the bad thing is not to know
what thirst is for.
3
You say nothing is created new?
Don't worry about it, with the mud
of the earth, make a cup
from which your brother can drink.
4
All things die and all things live forever;
but our task is to die,
To die making roads,
Roads over the sea.
5
To die...To fall like a drop
of water into the big ocean?
Or to be what I've never been:
a man without a shadow, without a dream,
a man all alone, walking,
without a mirror, and with no road?
6
Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
rudder, anchor, oars,
and the fear of going down.
- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)
__________________________________________________
De Proverbios y Cantares
1
Yo amo a Jesús, que nos dijo:
Cielo y tierra pasarán.
Cuando cielo y tierra pasen
mi palabra quedará.
¿Cuál fue, Jesús, tu palabra?
¿Amor? ¿Perdón? ¿Caridad?
Todas tus palabras fueron
una palabra: Velad.
2
Bueno es saber que los vasos
nos sirven para beber;
lo malo es que no sabemos
para qué sirve la sed.
3
¿Dices que nada se crea?
No te importe, con el barro
de la tierra, haz una copa
para que beba tu hermano.
4
Todo pasa y todo queda,
pero lo nuestro es pasar,
pasar haciendo caminos,
caminos sobre la mar.
5
Morir... ¿Caer como gota
de mar en el mar inmenso?
¿O ser lo que nunca he sido:
uno, sin sombra y sin sueño,
un solitario que avanza
sin camino y sin espejo?
XLVI
Anoche soñé que oía
a Dios, gritándome: ¡Alerta!
Luego era Dios quien dormía,
y yo gritaba: ¡Despierta!
6
Cuatro cosas tiene el hombre
que no sirven en la mar:
ancla, gobernalle y remos,
y miedo de naufragar.
- Antonio Machado
On the Nature of Understanding
Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So its
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.
- Kay Ryan
A Memory Of TheFuture
I will say tree, not pine tree.
I will say flower, not forsythia.
I will see birds, many birds,
flying in four directions.
Then rock and cloud will be
lost. Spring will be lost.
And, most terribly,
your name will be lost.
I will revel in a world
no longer particular.
A world made vague,
as if by fog. But not fog.
Vaguely aware,
I will wander at will.
I will wade deeper
into wide water.
You'll see me, there,
out by the horizon,
an old gray thing,
who finally knows
gray is the most beautiful color.
- Elizabeth Spires
In the Elementary School Choir
I had never seen a cornfield in my life,
I had never been to Oklahoma,
But I was singing as loud as anyone,
“Oh what a beautiful morning. . . . The corn
Is as high as an elephant’s eye,”
Though I knew something about elephants I thought,
Coming from the same continent as they did,
And they being more like camels than anything else.
And when we sang from Meet Me in St. Louis,
“Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,”
I remembered the ride from Ramleh Station
In the heart of Alexandria
All the way to Roushdy where my grandmother lived,
The autos on the roadway vying
With mule carts and bicycles,
The Mediterranean half a mile off on the left,
The air smelling sharply of diesel and salt.
It was a problem which had dogged me
For a few years, this confusion of places,
And when in 5th grade geography I had pronounced
“Des Moines” as though it were a village in France,
Mr. Kephart led me to the map on the front wall,
And so I’d know where I was,
Pressed my forehead squarely against Iowa.
Des Moines, he’d said. Rhymes with coins.
Now we were singing “zippidy-doo-dah, zippidy-ay,”
And every song we’d sung had in it
Either sun or bluebirds, fair weather
Or fancy fringe, O beautiful America!
And one tier below me,
There was Linda Deemer with her amber waves
And lovely fruited plains,
And she was part of America too
Along with sun and spacious sky
Though untouchable, and as distant
As purple mountains of majesty.
“This is my country,” we sang,
And a few years ago there would have been
A scent of figs in the air, mangoes,
And someone playing the oud along a clear stream.
But now it was “My country ‘tis of thee”
And I sang it out with all my heart
And now with Linda Deemer in mind.
“Land where my fathers died,” I bellowed,
And it was not too hard to imagine
A host of my great uncles and -grandfathers
Stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior
And finding themselves suddenly
On a rock among maize and poultry
And Squanto shaking their hands.
How could anyone not think America
Was exotic when it had Massachusetts
And the long tables of thanksgiving?
And how could it not be home
If it were the place where love first struck?
We had finished singing.
The sun was shining through large windows
On the beatified faces of all
Who had sung well and with feeling.
We were ready to file out and march back
To our room where Mr. Kephart was waiting.
Already Linda Deemer had disappeared
Into the high society of the hallway.
One day I was going to tell her something.
Des Moines, I was saying to myself,
Baton Rouge. Terre Haute. Boise.
- Gregory Djanikian
(from Falling Deeply into America. Copyright © 1989 Carnegie Mellon University Press)
Litany
"You are the bread and the knife
The crystal goblet and the wine."
-Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass,
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is no way you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in the boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's teacup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--
the wine.
- Billy Collins
Can somebody out there explain this poem to me please? :wink:
Day Dream
One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.
- A. S. J. Tessimond
Working Together
We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.
The visible
and the invisible
working together
in common cause,
to produce
the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way
the intangible air
passed at speed
round a shaped wing
easily
holds our weight.
So may we, in this life
trust
to those elements
we have yet to see
or imagine,
and look for the true
shape of our own self
by forming it well
to the great
intangibles about us.
- David Whyte
Hi Marc,
I LOVE this poem, and here's what I think it means--a wild guess, of course, based on ever so subjective gut reaction.
We are both many-sided, with some real beauties but not all of them.
I think the particular images are not really interpretable, but I get the sense that, feeling-wise, they are ACCURATE. By accurate I mean true to his perception, and I believe (without any rational reason but truly) that he's right, both about the perception and the reality.
kathy
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by marcwordsmith:
I was referring to the Billy Collins one, "Litany"
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by kpage9:
What Never Changes
What never changes, always
Changes, remains an aftertaste
Or forethought. The sand always
Arrives, changing grain by grain.
We sit,
We watch through half-closed lids or
Listen, our hands itching
To plunge into the clay of
Creation, make it our own.
Always, and no matter,
We are the recipient, the Giver
Goes before us, adoring
Our clumsy intentions.
- Rebecca del Rio
To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
1.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.
2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs….
4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
The dancer, the potter,
To make me a begging bowl
Which I believe
My soul needs.
And if I come to you,
To the door of your comfortable house
With unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
Will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.
Congratulations, if
You have changed.
6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?
And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure-
Your life-
What would do for you?
7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
through with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
- Mary Oliver
Your Blinded Hand
Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would
find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us
would find
the other’s hand.
We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
moment,
And against all reason,
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine –
And each of us would find a blinded hand.
- Tennessee Williams
Thinking Ahead To Possible Options And A Worst-Case Scenario
I swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel
in the center of the road and that's when
the deer came charging out of the forest
and forced me to hit the brakes for all I
was worth and I careened back to the other
side of the road just as a skunk came toddling
out of Mrs. Bancroft's front yard and I swung
back perhaps just grazing it a bit. I glanced
quickly in the rearview mirror and in that
instant a groundhog waddled from the side
of the road and I zigzagged madly and don't
know if I nipped it or not because up ahead I
could see a coyote stalking the Collier's
cat. Oh well, I said, and drove the rest
of the way home without incident.
- James Tate
When They Sleep
All people are children when they sleep.
There's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
- God, teach me the language of sleep.
- Rolf Jacobsen (Norway, 1907-1994)
(The Roads Have Come to an End Now, translation by Robert Hedin)
Our Voices When We Wake
Our voices when we wake
are light and soft
and young
When we awake from sleep
from the place of deep breathing
the safe space
in the warm dark
Could we stay so undefended
in the daylight world
the world of hard edges
that our tight voices mimic?
If we could approach one another
soft-voiced, light, easy
still connected to
the small flowing child-self within
We would be like those gentle visitors
we imagine
from some evolved other world.
We could create that world here.
- Nina Mermey Klippel
A blind man was riding an unheated train,
From Bryansk he was traveling home with his fate.
Fate whispered to him so the whole car could hear:
And why should you care about blindness and war?
It’s good, she was saying, you’re sightless and poor.
If you were not blind, you’d never survive.
The Germans won’t kill you, you’re nothing to them.
Allow me to lift that bag on your shoulder—
The one with the holes, the empty torn one.
Let me just raise your eyelids wide open.
The blind man was traveling home with his fate,
Now thankful for blindness. Happy about it.
- Arseny Tarkovsky
(Written in a cargo train, between Bryansk and Zhivodovka, 1943
Translated from the Russian by Philip Metres & Dimitri Psurtsev)
Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
- Mary Oliver
Ode to the Tomato
The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
the light
splits
in two halves
of tomato,
the juice
runs
through the streets.
In June
the tomato
cuts loose,
invades
the kitchens,
takes over lunches,
sits down
comfortably
on sideboards,
among the glasses,
the butter dishes,
the blue saltshakers.
It has its own light,
a benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we have to
assassinate it;
the knife plunges
into its living flesh,
it is a red
viscera,
a cool,
deep,
inexhaustible
sun
fills the salads
of Chile,
is cheerfully married
to the clear onion
and to celebrate,
oil lets itself
fall,
son and essence
of the olive tree,
onto the half-open hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism:
it is the day's
wedding,
parsley
raises
little flags,
potatoes
vigorously boil,
with its aroma
the steak
pounds
on the door,
it's time!
let's go!
-*Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Oda al tomate
La calle
se llenó de tomates,
mediodía,
verano,
la luz
se parte
en dos
mitades
de tomate,
corre
por las calles
el jugo.
En diciembre
se desata
el tomate
invade
las concinas,
entra por los almuerzos,
se sienta
reposado
en los aparadores,
entre los vasos,
las mantequilleras,
los saleros azules.
Tiene
luz propia,
majestad benigna.
Debemos, por desgracia
asesinarlo;
se hunde
el cuchillo
en su pulpa viviente,
en una roja
vícera,
un sol
fresco,
profundo,
inagotable,
llena las ensalades
de Chile,
se casa alegremente
con la clara cebolla,
y para celebralo
se deja
caer
aceite,
hijo
esencial del olivo,
sobre sus hemisferios entreabiertos,
agrega
la pimienta
su fragancia,
la sal su magnetismo:
son las bodas
del día
el perejil
levanta
banderines,
las papas
hierven vigorosamente,
el asado
golpea
con su aroma
en la puerta,
es hora!
vamos!
-*Pablo Neruda
Fresh
To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?
-Naomi Shihab Nye
The Light By The Barn
The light by the barn that shines all night
pales at dawn when a little breeze comes.
A little breeze comes breathing the fields
from their sleep and waking the slow windmill.
The slow windmill sings the long day
about anguish and loss to the chickens at work.
The little breeze follows the slow windmill
and the chickens at work till the sun goes down--
Then the light by the barn again.
- William Stafford
Hay for the Horses
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
- Gary Snyder
For Jean Koda
(March 19, 1919 - July 13, 2011)
My Japanese-American Mother-in-law
Born in America
Tough with brokers
A smart trader,
Grew up working barefoot
in the Delta, on the farm.
Doesn't like Japan.
Sits in the early morning
By the window, coffee in hand,
Gazing at cherry blossoms.
Needing no poem.
- Gary Snyder
No Ordinary Sun
for lost M'whera Miners & Korea North & South
Tree let your arms fall:
raise them not sharply in supplication
to the bright enhaloed cloud.
Let your arms lack toughness and
resilience for this is no mere axe
to blunt nor fire to smother.
Your sap shall not rise again
to the moon's pull.
No more incline a deferential head
to the wind's talk, or stir
to the tickle of coursing rain.
Your former shagginess shall not be
wreathed with the delightful flight
of birds nor shield
nor cool the ardour of unheeding
lovers from the monstrous sun.
Tree let your naked arms fall
nor extend vain entreaties to the radiant ball.
This is no gallant monsoon's flash,
no dashing trade wind's blast.
The fading green of your magic
emanations shall not make pure again
these polluted skies . . . for this
is no ordinary sun.
O tree
in the shadowless mountains
the white plains and
the drab sea floor
your end at last is written.
- Hone Tuwhare
Lastness
A black bear sits alone
in the twilight, nodding from side
to side, turning slowly around and around
on himself, scuffing the four-footed
circle into the earth. He sniffs the sweat
in the breeze, he understands
a creature, a death-creature,
watches from the fringe of the trees,
finally he understands
I am no longer here, he himself
from the fringe of the trees watches
a black bear
get up, eat a few flowers, trudge away,
all his fur glistening
in the rain.
And what glistening! Sancho Fergus,
my boychild, had such great shoulders,
when he was born his head
came out, the rest of him stuck. And he opened
his eyes: his head out there all alone
in the room, he squinted with pained,
barely unglued eyes at the ninth-month’s
blood splashing beneath him
on the floor. And almost
smiled, I thought, almost forgave it all in advance.
When he came wholly forth
I took him up in my hands and bent
over and smelled
the black, glistening fur
of his head, as empty space
must have bent
over the newborn planet
and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.
- Galway Kinnell
The Moon
The moon can be taken in teaspoons
or as a capsule every two hours.
It is a good hypnotic or narcotic
and relieves, too,
hangovers of those drunk on philosophy.
*
A piece of the moon tucked in the pocket
is a better good luck charm than a rabbit’s foot;
It works as a love charm,
to get rich without connections
and to ward off doctors.
*
It can be given as a treat to children
when they can’t sleep.
A few moon drops in the eyes of the elderly
help them die well.
*
Put a tender new moon leaf
under your pillow
and you will see your heart’s desire.
*
Always carry a small jar of moon air
for when you are drowning,
And give a*key tothe moon
to prisoners and the disillusioned,
to those condemned to death
and those condemned to life.
*
There is no better tonic than the moon
given in precise, controlled doses.
* - Jaime Sabines (1926-99)
(Translated by Rebecca Del Rio)
Appassionata
After the rising dissonance
with the trumpet and the sax
trying to out-shout each other
and the drums, the drums,
trying to shut them both down,
came the silence-- two, three, five--
one hardly dared to count--
eight, thirteen...
and the cello began
in such pure and hesitant
sweetness
that the tears began to rise
and the flowers of tenderness
opened slowly
and we saw each other again
in our various and awkward beauty.
- Barbara Hazard
Blackberries
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
- Sylvia Plath
A Color of the Sky
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.
I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.
Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.
Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,
which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
- Tony Hoagland
First thought: "Too long!"
My attempt to escape was unsuccessful.
Subconscious forced me to scan and my eyes caught
What I thought...
What I thought...
What I thought...
The chorus hooks me in.
As he says...
And now I'm glad.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Mockingbirds
This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing
the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing
better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.
In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door
to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,
but gods.
It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give
but their willingness
to be attentive--
but for this alone
the gods loved them
and blessed them--
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water
from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,
and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing
but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.
Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--
whatever it was I said
I would be doing--
I was standing
at the edge of the field--
I was hurrying
through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--
I was leaning out;
I was listening.
- Mary Oliver
Affirmation After Evidence It’s Still Kali Yuga
It’s still true what he said long ago,
the world is upside down.
But the trees are not upside down,
nor the grass,
nor the breeze,
nor the hills,
nor the sea,
nor the stunning, constant sky.
And even cities, at 3 AM
when the greed-spigot’s shut off
and everyone’s gone
somewhere we can’t see—
or silenced by snow—
can be places of silent wonder.
Although when we walk here
we must bring with us
the freshness of a higher realm,
let us not forget
there are allies,
many quiet,
steadfast allies.
- Max Reif
What Work Is
My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.
Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?
All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,
and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.
Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.
- Phillip Levine
August
When the blackberies hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody own, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is; In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
- Mary Oliver
Lemonade Stand
When I was six,
My Mom promised to help me set up a lemonade stand
to sell lemonade to the big boys
who played stickball in the street
in front of our house in Granada Hills.
But in my excitement
I peppered her with
too many questions."One more question. . ." she warned.
A minute later I lost my lemonade stand.
Since then
I have never been much excited
about anything.
Never desiring anything with much ardor,
never feeling anything with much pain.
Accepting only things which came easily,
which seemed to be
overly exciting women
and underly exciting jobs.
I became a Buddhist
because Buddhists
are supposed to eliminate
all desire and passion,
which is very easy for a guy who lost
his lemonade stand.
But my Buddhist soul
longs to be a Catholic (Italian!)
or Jewish (Paul Newman!)
or even a Texan (Caballero!).
I want to sing arias
outside my Italian girlfriend's window.
I want to dance to Hava Nagila.
Also with my Italian girlfriend.
I want to ride a Palomino horse
across the Texas plains,
the breasts of my Italian girlfriend
pressed into my shoulders.
Sadly, my songs, dances and rides
were done with insufficient passion and excitement.
There are worse things
than losing your lemonade stand.
But in my dreams
I'm on my deathbed
a pink plastic hospital cup
full of the holy yellow elixir
falls to the floor,
and in my dying breath
I utter the words,
"Lemonade stand..."
My Italian girlfriend
wailing by my side.
- Greg Kimura
The Phone Call
I can hear words in your breath,
words alien to any language
but audible as you sleep.
Sometimes you will speak words
as you dream,
but tonight it is the breath itself
that speaks a sustained prayer
from your breast.
Morning, and your side of the bed is empty.
I stare at the impression your body has made
wondering how long
before I too, fell into the vocal chamber
of a dreaming flesh.
Over breakfast, pouring coffee,
buttering toast, we make small talk.
When the phone rings
it is I that get up to answer it.
Your sister in tears on the line.
Father dead, massive stroke,
in the background,
the sound of weeping relatives.
I look across at you,
as you sip orange juice.
Now I remember the words
of your breath last night.
How you were not praying
but chanting a spell against
the coming of the dawn.
- Eric Ashford
This poem could easily be read aloud, irreverent and hilarious.
There is also another way...
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
What Were They Like?
Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?
Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.
- Denise Levertov
Our Valley
We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.
You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.
You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
- Phillip Levine
Epiphany
Just as I gave up waiting
and turned back to tend the fire,
the full moon rose over the Mogollon Rim,
sending a flashflood of light
racing up the narrow canyon.
Sometimes the distance
between the ordinary and the sacred
is no greater than the width
of a moonbeam.
- Larry Robinson
You and Art
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;
and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.
- William Stafford
The Shop
Lightning falling on the helpless,
a surge of pearl out of the rock
covering the rock, this life torn into a hundred pieces,
and one of those pieces a ticket
to let me back into my life.
A spirit world divided into eight sections, one a scroll.
Eight scrolls in the parchment of your face.
What kind of bird am I becoming, kneeling like a camel,
pecking at the fire like an ostrich?
You and I have worked in the same shop for years.
Our loves are great fellow workers.
Friends cluster there, and every moment we notice
a new light coming out in the sky.
Invisible, yet taking form, like Christ coming through
Mary. In the cradle, God.
Shams, why this inconsistency
that we live with love,
and yet we run away?
- Jellaludin Rumi
(tr. Coleman Barks)
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
- Gary Snyder
Inventing A Horse
Inventing a horse is not easy.
One must not only think of the horse.
One must dig fence posts around him.
One must include a place where horses like to live;
or do when they live with humans like you.
Slowly, you must walk him in the cold;
feed him bran mash, apples;
accustom him to the harness;
holding in mind even when you are tired
harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil
to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun;
one must imagine teaching him to run
among the knuckles of tree roots,
not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves,
and not to grow thin in the city,
where at some point you will have to live;
and one must imagine the absence of money.
Most of all though: the living weight,
the sound of his feet on the needles,
and, since he is heavy, and real,
and sometimes tired after a run
down the river with a light whip at his side,
one must imagine love
in the mind that does not know love,
an animal mind, a love that does not depend
on your image of it,
your understanding of it;
indifferent to all that it lacks:
a muzzle and two black eyes
looking the day away, a field empty
of everything but witch grass, fluent trees,
and some piles of hay.
- Meghan O’Rourke
Ode to the Fish
Nights, when I can’t sleep, I listen to the sea lions
barking from the rocks off the lighthouse.
I look out the black window into the black night
and think about the fish stirring the ocean.
Muscular tuna, their lunge and thrash
churning the water to froth,
whipping up a squall, storm of hunger.
Herring cruising, river of silver in the sea,
wide as a lit city. And all the small breaths:
pulse of frilled jellyfish, thrust of squid,
frenzy of krill, transparent skin glowing
green with the glass shells of diatoms.
Billions swarming up the water column each night,
gliding down at dawn. They’re the greased motor
that powers the world, whirring
Mixmaster folding the planet’s batter.
Shipping heat to the Arctic, hauling cold
to the tropics, currents unspooling around the globe.
My room is so still, the bureau lifeless,
and on it, inert, the paraphernalia of humans:
keys, coins, shells that once rocked in the tides—
opalescent abalone, pearl earrings.
Only the clock’s sea green numerals
register their small changes. And shadows
the moon casts—fan of maple branches—
tick across the room. But beyond the cliffs
a blue whale sounds and surfaces, cosmic
ladle scooping the icy depths. An artery so wide,
I could swim through into its thousand pound heart.
- Ellen Bass
Pax
All that matters is to be at one with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.
Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth and yawning before the fire.
Sleeping on the hearth of the living world,
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of a master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.
- D.H. Lawrence
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
- Stanley Kunitz
Cast All Your Votes For Dancing
I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.
I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.
But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.
You can stay that way
And even bloom!
Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter.
Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.
Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days
Like a broken man
Behind a farting camel.
You are with the Friend now.
Learn what actions of yours delight Him,
What actions of yours bring freedom
And Love.
Whenever you say God's name, dear pilgrim,
My ears wish my head was missing
So they could finally kiss each other
And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!
O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter
And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.
Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!
- Hafiz
I've Broken Through To Longing
I've broken through to longing
Now, filled with a grief I have
Felt before, but never like this.
The center leads to love.
Soul opens the creation core.
Hold on to your particular pain.
That too can take you to God.
- Jellaludin Rumi
(translated by Coleman Barks)
A Zero-Circle
Be helpless and dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come
from grace to gather us up.
We are too dulleyed to see the beauty.
If we say "Yes we can," we'll be lying.
If we say "No, we don¹t see it,"
that "No" will behead us
and shut tight our window into spirit.
So let us not be sure of anything,
besides ourselves, and only that, so
miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero-circle, mute,
we will be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, "Lead us."
When we¹ve totally surrendered to that beauty,
we'll become a mighty kindness.
- Jellaludin Rumi
( Mathnawi IV, 3748-3754
translated by Coleman Barks)
Translucence
Once I understood (till I forget, at least)
the immediacy of new life, Vita Nuova,
redemption not stuck in linear delays,
I perceived also (for now) the source
of unconscious light in faces
I believe are holy, not quite transparent,
more like the half-opaque whiteness
of Japanese screens or lampshades,
grass or petals imbedded in the paper-thin
substance which is not paper as this is paper,
and which permits the passage of what is luminous
though forms remain unseen behind its protection.
I perceived that in such faces, through
the translucence we see, the light we intuit
is of the alrady resurrected, each
a Lazarus, but a Lazarus (man or woman)
without the memory of tomb or of any
swaddling bands except perhaps
the comforting ones of their first
infant hours, the warm receiving blanket ...
They know of themselves nothing different
from anyone else. This great unknowing
is part of their holiness. They are always trying
to share out joy as if it were cake or water,
something ordinary, not rare at all.
- Denise Levertov
The Vacation
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.
- Wendell Berry
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among the far, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
- Galway Kinnell
Blackberries by the Roadway
In scarred roadcuts
forgotten tracks
of some otherwise interested
caterpillar
lies the bramble
Sharp Himalayan spines
protecting the fruit
that comes wild
every hot September
from the thick stalked
wild blackberry.
Not wild, really,
imported and big berried
just as commercial strawberries
are larger and less flavorful
than their wild cousins.
But those big dull ones
you know
that grow big
in the center of the bunch
with their shiny, sour
younger siblings
all around.
Sweetness and hard seeds
and staining purple ink
a pleasure
to make
pope Innocent
blush.
They are only black
till you touch them.
- David Bean
When school or mosque, tower or minaret get torn down,
Then Dervishes may begin their community.
For only when faithfulness turns to betrayal
And betrayal into trust
Can any human being become part of the truth.
- Jellaludin Rumi
Watching the Jet Planes Dive
We must go back and find a trail on the ground
back of the forest and mountain on the slow land;
we must begin to circle on the intricate sod.
By such wild beginnings without help we may find
the small trail on through the buffalo-bean vines.
We must go back with noses and the palms of our hands,
and climb over the map in far places, everywhere,
and lie down whenever there is doubt and sleep there.
If roads are unconnected we must make a path,
no matter how far it is, or how lowly we arrive.
We must find something forgotten by everyone alive,
and make some fabulous gesture when the sun goes down
as they do by custom in little Mexico towns
where they crawl for some ritual up a rocky steep.
The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.
- William Stafford
The Dakini Speaks
My friends, let's grow up. Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here. Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice. Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost. It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long? Let's grieve our losses fully, like human ripe beings. But please, let's not be so shocked by them. Let's not act so betrayed, As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life's only promise to us, And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child, she seems cruel, but she is only wild, And her compassion exquisitely precise. Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth, She strips away the unreal to show us the real. This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it! Let's stop making deals for a safe passage - There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high. We are not children anymore.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost. Let's dance the wild dance of no hope.
© Jennifer Welwood
https://jenniferwelwood.com/poetry/the-dakini-speaks/
When school or mosque, tower or minaret get torn down,
Then Dervishes may begin their community.
For only when faithfulness turns to betrayal
And betrayal into trust
Can any human being become part of the truth.
- Jellaludin Rumi
The Envoy
One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.
Who, seeing me enter,
whipe the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.
I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.
For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body.
Not knowing how it came in.
Not knowing how it went out.
It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept whre l ight could not go.
Its scent was n either snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.
There are opening in our lives
of which we know nothing.
Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.
- Jane Hirshfield
Scars
They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.
Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can’t reach when they sing.
Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.
- William Stafford
The Faces at Braga
In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight
the old shrine room waits in silence
While above the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, "Will you step through?"
And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.
We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,
see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light.
Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.
Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers
we have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
then slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.
Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carvers hand.
If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver's hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.
If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,
we would smile, too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.
When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.
And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.
If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carvers hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers
feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.
Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration
to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands.
- David Whyte
(Where Many Rivers Meet)
Given
The trees presenting their offerings,
the rumple of weeds like children
hanging on the neck of the brook,
the host that pours through the city
are not merely here,
not simply stumbled upon,
I have given them to you.
This day, its delights, its troubles,
your whole life, your death,
this moment,
are not happenstance or imposed,
they are what I wear.
What you encounter in this world
is not here of its own accord
or for its own sake,
it is how I give myself to you.
- Steve Garnaas-Holmes
A Timbered Choir
Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.
I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.
Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.
The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.
Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.
- Wendell Berry
Morning Poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
- Mary Oliver
The Monk's Robe
The push
The pull
The black garment must be
Just so.
A fold
A tie
Pulled across his
Strong back
It drapes
It flows
But still can't hide
The man
With a shaved head
And a clean heart
Who knows --
Karma is not the same
As destiny
And everything is
One's self
Who knows --
The body and the mind
Are one
Single thing
Yet if you love somebody
And separate
You will suffer.
- Doug von Koss
Abano Terme, Italy, November 1995
After a lecture by Tokuda Ryotan
Of the International Buddhist Institute of Latin America
Learning from History
They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,
Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.
They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,
Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm.
I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,
And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this?
They said, my poets, singers of my song,
We cannot tell, since all we tell you is
But history, we speak but of the dead.
And of the dead they said such history
(Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)
As made of much of me a mystery.
- David Ferry
Snowflakes
Ecclesiastes says “for everything there is a season.”
You say “It’s tax season;
it’s baseball season; it’s allergy season;
I’ve got to season the steak on the barbie;
besides, I don’t have time to change the world.”
Goethe tells us of the genius, power and magic in boldness.
You say “What can I do, anyway?
The foxes are guarding the henhouse;
the juggernaught is out of control;
we’re all just snowflakes in a windstorm.”
The mountain asks “Which snowflake, falling,
will be the one to send down the avalanche
to change this entire landscape?”
- Larry Robinson
The Cure
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
Seamus Heaney's translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles
The Thought Machine
Its little eye stares “On” in its forehead
by its maker’s name. They say it anticipates
its memories and holds “Eureka!” tight
in little wheels so sure that all steel
hardens when incorporated in it.
The only Please it knows is, Be Correct;
but it can tolerate mistakes.
You tell your troubles to it, how your letters
all came back with no acknowledgment
and all you wanted was assurance all was known.
It tugs its collar; its little eye glows on.
You tell about the woman at the corner
ringing the bell to bring Jesus and his weather.
That is long ago.
You tell of the hill that never attracted the deer;
you think it frightened them, a fear place,
where you always had to go to listen—it was
for your town and for the world; it was for…—
and you are back there, listening again:
the little eye goes kind; the forehead
has the noble look that hill had.
And the world whirls into vision; in Tibet
a prayer wheel turns for you; an Eskimo
by such a northern fire lives that you live so,
touching only important things;
you see that all machines belong;
the deer are safe;
a letter has reached home.
- William Stafford
Manifesto: 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 even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a
card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy somethin
they will call you. When they wnat you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- Wendell Berry
Parowan Canyon
When granite and sandstone begin to blur
and flow, the eye rests on cool white aspen.
Strange, their seeming transparency.
How as in a sudden flash one remembers
a forgotten name, so the recollection. Aspen.
With a breeze in them, their quiet rhythms,
shimmering, quaking. Powder on the palm.
Cool on the cheek. Such delicacy
the brittle wood, limbs snapping
at a grasp, whole trees tumbling in the winds.
Sweet scent on a swollen afternoon.
Autumn, leaves falling one upon another, gold
rains upon a golden earth. How at evening
when the forest darkens, aspen do not.
And a white moon rises and silver stars
point toward the mountain, darkness
holds them so pale.
They stand still, very still.
- David Lee
At a Certain Age
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: "That's me."
- Czeslaw Milosz
Please and Thank You
Gracias, Chacho, short all your life,
barrel-chested chieftan of the grill
on Mendocino Boulevard. Not the one
featuring soupbowl margaritas
and singles karaoke on Friday nights,
where a dog in a dingleball sombrero
urges us inside, ¡andale, arriba!
I mean the one up the block, across
from the Vista Motel, with windows
whitewashed against afternoon sun;
the one I bike to, thirsty in August,
from all the way across town, because
I have two dollars and still no job.
I will push open the door and walk
my bike into the merciful cool,
up to the counter where I lay
my limp dinero down
and ask your brotherfor the special,
con pollo y frijoles negros.
And if instead of a Coca-Cola
I fill and refill a plastic cup
with ice water while I wait,
because every nickel counts,
there is no problem with that.
No problem, even though
this sweaty, heat-pink gabacho
will never be poor, and knows
nothing of the last dollar;
even though my independence,
my desperation, is voluntary,
like a second language
I am ashamed to speak here.
I will lay down whatever
baggage I carry, and when
the food arrives, I won't know
why I am hungry, only that I am.
At the table I will feast, in bliss,
on a flour tortilla enormous with rice
and chicken and black beans, food
enough to live on. It doesn't matter
what makes us hungry, Chacho,
only that there is hunger, that there
is food, and that for now
I am a guest in your home
and I will eat what you feed me.
- Yosha Bourgea
Shopping
for my mother
Now that you are gone
I know what you have made me
shrewd hands feeling tomatoes
looking for flaws
pinching them till they hurt
(you never know what they try to sell you)
you never know until you feel them)
and your careful scanning eyes
on the tilted
gossipy
horizon
looking for the thing that is wrong
in hems, coats, facial tics
(you can't imagine what some of them do
you never know what some of them are hiding)
your world is bright and round
it has oranges, melons, flowers
and small repeatable scandals
like the neighbor, Mrs. Grey, who
beat her children on their bare behinds
in plain sight
and the drama teacher, Mrs. Rice, who
ran over a child and kept saying,
as they took her away,
all I will ever see is that little blond head
the voice that broke my ears
the arms that never held me
never mind that
it's your hands,
after all,
and your small, inquisitive eyes,
that take me shopping.
- Thaisa Frank
Better looking at a river
I think what interests in a river is
persistence in change,
something always about to have been
curving toward you.
Also trout.
I like the glimpse.
Or watching their shadows slide
sidling over gravel,
flukes and fins responding
but upstream head held motionless
by trouty practice or craft.
And it's nice to swallow river,
trickle down a different curve.
Also trout – cooked
since it's never too early to begin
where transformation is concerned
though I've come to see that
river watches keep no time
and early seems not far from late.
What interests in a river at first
is that thing of sneaking up on beauty, how it hurts,
then the one about time and death,
then the long cool drink,
then the trout.
I walk richer from a river
collecting lots of interest there.
And better looking, too, I think,
for it becomes me.
- David Oates
Where the World is One
My smallest grandson does not understand yet what big means.
Those chickens are big, and he is going so close.
Oh the imagination is a dreadful thing.
My neighbors’ grandson was pecked by a rooster.
Flew at him for no reason
That rooster was big! Tore open the back of the boy’s head,
He went to the hospital for so many stitches.
His father went for the shotgun and killed that rooster dead.
This story looms now like a storm cloud.
I have taken you to buy eggs with me,
And we were invited to wander
As long as we like, out toward the hen house.
All that clucking rocks you like a lullaby.
You run on your little legs that still wobble,
You love the indescribable crowing of the roosters.
All the chickens running free in the yard, all those
Silky reds and shiny blacks, the streaks of gold
Holding light, combs as crimson as blood.
Some hens scratching their beaks on the ground,
as if sharpening a razor on a strap of leather,
back and forth they twist those beaks.
You go too close, too close in your curiosity.
They flap their wings and strut,
While I try to look really big, arms out
As if they were mountain lions. You are so happy
And oblivious, living in that innocent space we soon
pass out of. Where there is no mortal wound.
It is a place like the Book of Revelation promises
Where there are no more tears and sighing,
And all fears are gone, burned away in a lake of fire
That burns away all but that connection we are still searching for.
I hear you laughing with delight. You are in the garden
I have left, and angels, we are told, protect
that garden with a flaming sword.
I can look back through you, but cannot go back,
and there is this terrible grief
that you will have to leave.
and join us here East of Eden.
- Judith Stone
Well, this reminded me of the family story (I was too young to remember) about when one of my parents' roosters pecked me in the butt; my dad didn't take the time to get a gun--he just ran out and wrung the rooster's neck. Don't imagine that he got very poetic about it, either.
Sara
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
October
O hushed*October*morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed*October*morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day.
At*noon*release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with*frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost -
For the grape' sake along the wall.*
- Robert*Frost
October Arriving
I only have a measly ant
To think with today.
Others have pictures of saints,
Others have clouds in the sky.
The winter might be at the door,
For he’s all alone
And in a hurry to hide.
Nevertheless, unable to decide
He retraces his steps
Several times and finds himself
On a huge blank wall
That has no window.
Dark masses of trees
Cast their mazes before him,
Only to erase them next
With a sly, sea-surging sound.
-*Charles Simic
In Praise of Earth
We kept on dancing last summer though the dancing had been called subversive.
We weren't alone at the end of this particular world and knew
it wouldn't be the last world, though wars
had broken out on all sides.
We kept on dancing and with us were the insects who had gathered at the grounds
in the grasses and the trees. And with us were the stars and
a few lone planets who had been friends
with the earth for generations.
With us were the spirits who wished to honor this beloved earth in any beautiful
manner. And with us at dawn was the Sun who took the lead
and then we broke for camp, for stickball
and breakfast.
We all needed praise made of the heart's tattoo as it inspired our feet or wings,
someone to admire us despite our tendency to war, to terrible
stumbles. So does the red cliff who is the heart
broken to the sky.
So do the stones who were the first to speak when we arrived. So does the flaming
mountain who harbors the guardian spirits who refuse to abandon
us. And this Earth keeps faithfully to her journey, carrying us
around the Sun,
All of us in our rags and riches, our rages and promises, small talk and suffering.
As we go to the store to buy our food and forget to plant, sing so
that we will be nourished in turn. As we walk out
into the dawn,
With our lists of desires that her gifts will fulfill, as she turns our tears
into rivers of sweet water, we spiral between dusking and
dawn, wake up and sleep in this lush palace of creation,
rooted by blood, dreams, and history.
We are linked by leaf, fin, and root. When we climb through the sky to each
new day our thoughts are clouds shifting weather within us.
When we step out of our minds into ceremonial language we are humbled and amazed,
at the sacrifice. Those who forget become the people of stone who guard
the entrance to remembering. And the Earth keeps up her
dancing and she is neither perfect nor exactly in time.
She is one of us.
And she loves the dance for what it is. So does the Sun who calls the Earth
beloved. And praises her with light.
- Joy Harjo