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How It Seems To Me
In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Dear California, I Write to You from Grand Island, New York
It is the light in the sky
that reminds me of you,
the summer blue flowing by.
But the clouds here remind me
more of Paris, the calmness of them
as though inside a painting.
The goldfinches on the feeders
no longer flee from me, the cardinals
tell me where I live. California,
am I in denial? Will I miss you
when the white snow falls and falls
on the quiet island world?
If I returned to you, would I miss
the train whistle across the river,
the 10 p.m. fireworks from the Falls,
the Niagara that is San Francisco Bay
green one day, Monterey blue the next,
a rush of ice in early spring that I follow
until it crashes, gorgeously, into the gorge
to bump along its sonorous path
until it melts back to its source?
- Katherine Hastings
The Penitent
I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, “Little Sorrow, weep," said I,
“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I’ve been!”
Alas for pious planning—
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My Little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep—
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!
So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, “One thing there’s no getting by—
I’ve been a wicked girl," said I;
“But if I can’t be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Without Winter
Without winter
how would we know spring?
How would we know the delight
of the first bud of the rose,
or the sighting of a robin
at the break of day?
How would we know
that we climbed out of the drudge
that winter holds?
That we have been transformed
from our underworld dive?
Without winter in our soul
how would we feel renewed by love,
by the awakening of sleepy cells
that long ago remained unchanged?
How would we know if we
passed through hell
to come out healed?
How would we know
what healing is?
Without the depths of our journey
How would we know we arrived?
Without winter
how would we remember
that not a spring comes by
without its promise of renewal,
its soft colors,
enchanting breeze,
its welcoming silence, setting the stage
for that first sign of relief?
- Sherrie Lovler
Hello, dear Larry -
I just wished to express a special "thank you" for all the great poetry you source & send out to us. I love the way poetry offers us different lenses to view life through – it's become essential to me in that way.
I'm saddened today in hearing Mary Oliver has died. Another bright light has left us...but we will always have her illuminating work.
Would you happen to have a favorite poem of hers you might share in this forum?
Again, thanks for all the interesting & thought-provoking work you offer us. It really helps sustain humanity's beautiful side in our sometimes bleak day-to-day existence.
From my heart –
dre
here is one good one. there are many.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?
Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.
But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?
Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education.
When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,
as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?
- Mary Oliver
(September 10, 1935 - January 17, 2019
“The heart’s spiritual awakening is the true work of our lives.”
—Mary Oliver on Emerson
What I Have Learned So Far
Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of -- indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.
- Mary Oliver
Dear Ms. Oliver
I plan to squander the rest
of my wild and precious life
among the idle
who appreciate simple things:
hot showers
sudden smiles
real strawberry ice cream
deluge and drought
broken bay laurel leaves
cool sheets
dark nights.
And before I leave, please
give me another noisy river
a bent tree
a sparrow’s flash
and an overflight of clouds
before the moon.
Give me a few clear images
to save for a rainy day
or the last long night’s dream.
- Karl Frederick
“What do you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
The Summer Day – Mary Oliver
The Call of the Open
Which yet joined not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
- Ranier Maria Rilke
Of Love and Other Disasters
The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he’d had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t
anyone he’d ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who’d moved back south
to live with her high-school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don’t need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she’d been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn’t get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. “The life line,”
he said, “which one is that?” “None,”
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then—embarrassed—looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
Spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. “There,”
she said, lowering his glasses, “I
got it,” and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it’s too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.
- Philip Levine
The Listening Fields
In the end is the Word
a weaving of all the world’s tongues
folds soft as night wind, hard as jail cells
silent as sun sipping sea mist, loud as fighter jets
Ever becoming, ever ending
and the end that is Now, that is our doing and our undoing
is a biblical flood of torn multitudes
crowding de-spirited shores
wave upon wave, wounded, mourning,
fleeing what began
when Word left the breath
for the ledger, the royalized lie
Even as Now implodes, our stories ripen
in an over-bright unfolding
of Word’s fall from grace,
endgames defiling Holy writ
end flames of creed and greed
ripping primal energies asunder
engulfing the armed and the innocent
Spirit fruit seeded in song,
watered in courage beyond the lash on naked flesh
the chains of disdain, the rabid, feral tortures
the battlefields, the borders, the gunner pathologies
the creeping, seeping poisons
Spirit fruit
pressed into wine on the page
Libations for the holy ones
for children lean and staring through refugee fences
or plump and mirthless, staring at flickering screens
Libations for all the lined faces, the colonized eyes,
selves betraying self and other
even as Other flows on
quickening grass, rippling feathers and fur,
curving horns and thorns, pulsing into petals,
into skin and pollen and papery wings
the One and the All breathing each to each
As it was in the Beginning
when we entered as echoes
melodies of the Milky Way
star chords becoming the listening fields
finding Word in the listening fields
- Cynthia Poten
Nothing Alive at Yesterday’s Altar
Why kneel
in the ashes of yesterday’s altar
when each day rises unfathomable
as a new mystery
and I must look
with fresh eyes or see nothing
but the shadows
of what has been . . .
chasing Grace or Peace
Equanimity or Insight
that no longer burns
with Presence.
May I find the courage
each day
to make a fresh altar
of my life
- Kay Crista
Elegy in Joy
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
- Muriel Rukeyser
To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust
Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin
Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,
for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know
there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.
But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine
though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.
You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be
the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.
- Wendell Berry
Cheeky AI
That artificial intelligence
got me down to a T-shirt.
Chasing me from shopping site to
Newsy site to some perceived insight.
Now they got me pegged for
Sporti Active Cheeky Boyshort Swim Bottom.
Oh Lordy, next a silk silver swanky
Swath of side string silhouetted
Slit suit with a hussy hanky-panky
Upright Invite.
- Ernie Carpenter
Words From Kafka
Lady’s eyes opened to her shamed belief
she’d let me down she who very much the lady
she who for the first time shat the carpet
she who appeared to us to be pleading for release
she who we were pretty certain knew she was dying
she with no conceivable notion of what it all meant
she was love trust companion sad it was over
no notion of her life’s meaning and certainly no Kafka
All those shells those crustacean bodies swept up
on the shores of Bodega Bay they had gone along
with the flow without knowledge of any reason
they were done and fulfilled with their endings
And of beginnings does any wooly caterpillar
reflect: know for a mere instant of its impending
transition of metamorphosis? No Kafka here either
Nor can any Blake or Rilke angel fully fathom a reason
Having spent the greater portion of my reasoning age
dwelling upon the meaning of life and the fear of death
I discovered my self to be pleasantly serene as I lay dying
as my lungs filled with emboli and as my brain began to bleed
and again when that same brain went into electrical seizure
and even that sense of actually entering the realm of death
no white light no angel no fear of a heaven or a hell
merely the sense that all would be well that I might die
Or that if I lived I would follow advice and continue to age
gracefully though being anything but perfect I would stray
from the serenity known during those dying moments
The trick lies deep within the words of the aforementioned
Franz Kafka: The meaning of life is that it ends
those of Kurt Vonnegut: …and so it goes
also Jesus Christ: It is consummated
Amen
- Ed Coletti
A Dialogue Of Self And Soul
{My Soul} I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
{My Self}. The consecrates blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
>From some court-lady's dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn
{My Soul.} Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
{My self.} Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery --
Heart's purple -- and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
{My Soul.} Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known --
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
{My Self.} A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? --
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
- William Butler Yeats
A Man in His Life
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to live and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
- Yehuda Amichai
Borders of Tomorrow
It happens when grim and serious
men answer all questions with a flag
and dismiss talk of civil rights with
scribble of a pen.
It happens if the knees of democracy
buckle and dark money decides
who walks the long road home and
who gets a chauffeured ride.
It happens when the doors of freedom
slam shut on desperate, broken hands
and we lock away children who come
from foreign, hungry lands.
It happens when we ignore the signs
that tell us, not how or when, but enough
for us to know, we lose the country when
we, the people, lose control.
It happens when we let it happen.
- Patrice Warrender
Stay strong and keep the faith.
Change is coming and has already begun.
The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
The Leash
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
- Ada Limón
Apprenticed to Justice
The weight of ashes
from burned-out camps.
Lodges smoulder in fire,
animal hides wither
their mythic images shrinking
pulling in on themselves,
all incinerated
fragments
of breath bone and basket
rest heavy
sink deep
like wintering frogs.
And no dustbowl wind
can lift
this history
of loss.
Now fertilized by generations—
ashes upon ashes,
this old earth erupts.
Medicine voices rise like mists
white buffalo memories
teeth marks on birch bark
forgotten forms
tremble into wholeness.
And the grey weathered stumps,
trees and treaties
cut down
trampled for wealth.
Flat Potlatch plateaus
of ghost forests
raked by bears
soften rot inward
until tiny arrows of green
sprout
rise erect
rootfed
from each crumbling center.
Some will never laugh
as easily.
Will hide knives
silver as fish in their boots,
hoard names
as if they could be stolen
as easily as land,
will paper their walls
with maps and broken promises,
scar their flesh
with this badge
heavy as ashes.
And this is a poem
for those
apprenticed
from birth.
In the womb
of your mother nation
heartbeats
sound like drums
drums like thunder
thunder like twelve thousand
walking
then ten thousand
then eight
walking away
from stolen homes
from burned out camps
from relatives fallen
as they walked
then crawled
then fell.
This is the woodpecker sound
of an old retreat.
It becomes an echo.
an accounting
to be reconciled.
This is the sound
of trees falling in the woods
when they are heard,
of red nations falling
when they are remembered.
This is the sound
we hear
when fist meets flesh
when bullets pop against chests
when memories rattle hollow in stomachs.
And we turn this sound
over and over again
until it becomes
fertile ground
from which we will build
new nations
upon the ashes of our ancestors.
Until it becomes
the rattle of a new revolution
these fingers
drumming on keys.
- Kimberly Blaeser
Choices
for Drago Štambuk
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
- Tess Gallagher
Scintilla, Star
In the old place, there was no place
that did not see me.
Wherever I went mothers whispered
about me like a Greek chorus:
I heard that boy ... I heard that.
I was just a boy. But it was
true, what they said, that I liked
other boys, that I had stolen Sarah’s,
though he was four years older
and they were very much in love.
I made him break up with her
in a Chili’s parking lot
while I waited inside. I was
fourteen. How embarrassing
to have been fourteen, to have eaten
at that Chili’s, often. That summer
I had no taste for anything
but him. Faintly of chlorine.
When he left for college
I had no one. Sarah’s friends
stared me down at school.
I found it was better,
if I could not be no one,
to be someone. Small, but
particular. Specified, which was
an apprenticeship for special.
Cold, another word for cool.
- Jameson Fitzpatrick
The Gift
Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.
It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come - maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.
It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."
- William Stafford
One of our American greatest poets, in clarity and unassuming humility to the world, but also feels like a transcendentalist. I was introduced to him thru the poem "traveling through the dark" by Kathleen Fraser in the in 1971. If you want to learn to write well, there is a good place to start by reading him.