Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime*
we will learn everything*
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,*
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing*
from one field to another, in summer, and the*
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either*
knows enough already or knows enough to be*
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born*
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent*
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead*
oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly*
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display*
the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't*
mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course*
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and*
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?*
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,*
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;*
for example - I think this*
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -*
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the*
daisies for the field.*

-*Mary Oliver*

Listen for the Beloved

Listen for the Beloved.

The walls fall down.


Listen for the Beloved.

The stories wither to dust.


Listen for the Beloved.

The crockery dances in the cupboards.


Listen for the Beloved.

The animals obey their masters.


Empty your pockets.

You do not live in a tiny tent,

solitary in your peapod warmth

by a dwindling fire.



No, your tent is the sky.

And that lump in your throat

is not coal.

Neither is it gold.

It is not even yours.


Set free the herd

chained to your doorstep.

Set free the millers

honed to your wheel.


There is water aplenty

overflowing the

cup of the Beloved.

Drink by her soul hand.



- Gary Horvitz

Passover

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .
and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe

https://img860.imageshack.us/img860/6793/passover.jpg

that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

- Lynn Ungar

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

- Yehuda Amichai

Between

But it’s the cave I want to know.
Not how He left, rose, became a something
again. But what happens in the cave.

Not blood, not body, not wine stamped with the memory
of blood, but the space between breath
and breath where we are nowhere

to be found.
Someone weeps outside.
Someone tugs at the boulder.
Someone clings to a torn lock of His hair.

And inside, in the still, lightless air
the turning back
into everything.

- Kim Rosen

Wellfleet Shabbat

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.

The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.

The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.

The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.

Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekinah
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clean night.


- Marge Piercy

Seven Stanzas at Easter


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike

BirdBath

only this
matters: this ecstatic
baptism

this standing on stick-
thin legs where the singing
creek pools at the lip
of the waterfall

only this
ruby-feathered
chest diving to meet
its reflection

this beak piercing
again and again that quivering
surface, these wings half-
unfolding, a ruffle

of joy guiding rivers
of light a tumble
of droplets dressed
in rainbows along your hidden
spine

shattering all
decorum beneath
blue branches in quiet

assent. . .

- Elizabeth Reninger

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

- Zenkei Shibayama

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

- Kay Ryan

God's Mistakes

In the great city of Paris live all sorts of people,
Very tall Africans and very short,
Really tiny Europeans, grown-ups less than five feet tall.

And every morning on the Metro I see the man with the tumor
Ballooning from his neck, and the blind Tunisian flute-player.

And one Sunday, in the bone museum, at the Jardin des Plantes,
Among the dinosaurs and whales picked clean by time,
I saw the delicate, intertwined skeletons
Of fetal Siamese twins afloat in a bottle:

Marie et Christian, it says--
In Paris, they even baptize God's mistakes.

And outside the Pompidou,
There is the brash and balding mountain man
With the belly that could stop a train.
He earns his daily bread by playing the nasty fool
Before the crowds. How many people? 100? 200?

He yells, cajoles, and chases them;
Insults, humiliates, and captures them,
Then beats them on the head with an air-filled
Plastic bat or knees them in the crotch.

When he snatches an Asian tourist girl
And holds her like a trophy with one arm,
And with the other strips off his overalls

And stands before us in his billowing
Striped white and yellow boxer shorts, guffawing
At our discomfort and at hers, and points down,
Down there, beneath that huge belly,

We all gasp and we all clap,
Though we're pleased it isn't us.
He grabs her Nikon and stuffs it down
His shorts and snaps a snap. Un souvenir, he says.

But the belly itself, that's the freakish thing.
It sticks out from his body like an organ of its own,
Neither sagging like a beer belly nor round like a pregnancy,

Buy boxy, somehow, like a coffin for a baby,
Except there are these odd, protruding knots of muscle
Here and there, as if he built it up like that,

The way a man might idly sqeeze a rubber ball
While watching television. As he jerks it up and down,
Like a puppet, like a Pierrot wooing his Pierrette,
It's like a brain case

Surrounding its own intelligence,
Its blind and foraging hunger and its wiles.

Hey, Africain, he yells, and mimes a few steps
Of a mincing queen. He points to a woman's breasts:
Pas beaucoup, he sneers. Et vous! he yells,

Pointing at me, and by now I am embarrassed
For the human race
That we all put up with this burlesque:

The leather-coated dwarf; the acned, tattooed German
Teenage punk with a symphony of earrings; the bald Italian
Who gets his head shined with a dirty cloth.

Still, I stand in my spot on the vast
And sloping apron of the Pompidou,
Grinning and embarrassed but pleased with the attention,

So when he summons me, I go to him,
Like a penitent to the altar,
Like a reluctant child to his father.

He lies down, very gingerly, on his back,
On a bed of nails, and commands,
Asseyez-vous sur moi!

So I sit, right on that thing, that belly.
He begins to move it, slowly, up and down,

I am a child again in the park on a seesaw
The first time I could do it without help.
My mother is beaming and applauding, as is this crowd,
At my bad luck and my good nature, as I bounce

Up and down for all the world a fool to see,
Having a good old time, until the thing is done,
And I slide off, to go about my business

Of being a tourist in the great city of Paris
Among the albinos and the amputees, the retarded
And the refugees, the omnipresent unemployable

Winos and beggars, Maries et Christians, knowing for once
Exactly which one of God's mistakes I am.

- Steve Orlen

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

Toward The Space Age
*
We must begin to catch hold of everything
around us, for nobody knows what we
may need. We have to carry along
the air, even; and the weight we once
thought a burden turns out to form
the pulse of our life and the compass for our brain.
Colors balance our fears, and existence
begins to clog unless our thoughts
can occur unwatched and let a fountain of essential silliness
out through our dreams.
And oh I hope we can still arrange
for the wind to blow, and occasionally
some kind of shock to occur, like rain,
and stray adventures no one cares about --
harmless love, immoderate guffaws on corners,
families crawling around the front room growling,
being bears in the piano cave.

- William Stafford

The Turtle

breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water, dragging her shell
with its mossy scutes
across the shallows and through the rushes
and over the mudflats, to the uprise,
to the yellow sand,
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest, and hunker there spewing
her white eggs down
into the darkness, and you think


of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do----
and then you realize a greater thing----
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.


She can’t see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,
she doesn’t dream
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

- Mary Oliver

For reasons with which I won't bore you, I erroneously attributed yesterday's poem, "Toward The Space Age", to Mary Oliver. It was actually written by William Stafford. This is not to first time - and will probably not be the last time - that I have goofed in this way. My apologies to you, to Mary and to Bill.
Larry

White Heron


What lifts the heron on its two soft kissing kites
I praise without a name.
A crouch, a flare,
A shape thought at the sky, a long stroke through the cumulus of trees
Then . . . gone.
Oh, rare!

Saint Francis, happiest on his knees,
Would have cried, "Father!"
Cry anything you please,
But praise,
Praise the white original that lights the blue expanse of sky.

While saints report their doves and rays
I sit by pond scums 'till the air recites its heron back
And doubt all else but praise.


- John Ciardi

Blue Heron

Blue Heron
symbol of the river city:
Portland on the Willamette
and Mighty Columbia.

August in her stillness
A heron on the far shore,
Awesome up close
a B-52 dices between
city houses, wings aslant
to miss the buildings

Eight foot wingspan
Acing down gulp koi
from the backyard pond.

Mighty hungry kisses
says the empty pool.
Mighty hungry kisses.

- David Bean

Hope and Love

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one--
not knowing even
that was what he did--
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Blue Egg

This morning, a great blue heron rose from the swamp like the second coming.
I'd never seen the high nests in the far off trees until it rose. Green
buds are pulsing out of the fingers of trees and the long sleep is shaken
from our bodies as we stumble back into the spotty light. All winter in our
borrowed home my son has been collecting egg cartons. Every week he stores
another cardboard carton beneath the sink. "For the chickens, Momma." He
says. "When we raise chickens, we can sell the eggs." The sky sits above
the trees-blue as the heron. Blue as a dyed eggs. Blue as a promise. When
the bird rose this morning he brought what was land bound (our hearts, our
eyes) up to the possibility of sky.

- Iris Dunkle

Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:
that on one summer morning here, the ocean
pounded in on tumbledown breakers,
a south wind, bustling along the shore,
whipped the froth into little rainbows,
and a reckless gull swept down the beach
as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,
looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down
so it wouldn't be lost forever --
that once upon a time we had
meadows here, and astonishing things,
swans and frogs and luna moths
and blue skies that could stagger your heart.
We could have had them still,
and welcomed you to earth, but
we also had the righteous ones
who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.

When you go home to your shining galaxy,
say that what you learned
from this dead and barren place is
to beware the righteous ones.

- Phillip Appleman

Often I Imagine The Earth


Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

- Dan Gerber

We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

Miracle Fair


Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

- Wislawa Szymborska
(translation by Joanna Trzeciak)

Freedom's Plow
*
When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.
First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.
The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.
A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!
With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.
Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.
Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.
A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently too for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.
With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.
America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land."
America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!
A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

- Langston Hughes

Earth
*
Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,
*
to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,
*
the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver
*
running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants
*
cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.
*
This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
*
you can never be dispossessed.
*
- Derek Walcott

For My Daughter

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

- David Ignatow

More Than We Know



Windows of the building across the way

facing away from the sun,

are filled with golden light.

How can it be?



They are reflecting

light reflected from mine.



Could there be

accidental gifts

we give

without knowing it?


- Nina Mermey Klippel

Ozymandias of Egypt
*
I met a traveller from an antique land *
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone *
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, *
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown *
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command ******
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read *
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, *
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. *
And on the pedestal these words appear: *
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: *
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" *
Nothing beside remains: round the decay *
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, *
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- P. B. Shelley

Enlightenment

Forget about enlightenment.

Sit down wherever you are
and listen to the wind singing
in your veins.

Feel the love, the longing and
the fear in your bones.

Open your heart to who you
are right now, not who you’d
like to be. Not the saint you’re
striving to become, but the
being right there before you,
inside you, around you.

All of you is holy.

You’re already more and less
than whatever you can know.

Breathe out, look in, let go.

- John Welwood

Variation On The Word Sleep


I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

- Margaret Atwood