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The Way It Is
There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
But you don't ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
Wow, this one is SO simple, SO succinct.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
It covers God, Intuition, Buddha-Nature, or whatever one might call it or not call it!
Just don't let go the thread!
:heart:
Stafford is one of my favorites, especially his "Travelling thru the dark".
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:
Blue Heron Walking
Not one of Mr. Balachine’s soloists had feet this articulate,
the long bones explicitly spread, then retracted, even more
finely detailed than Leonardo’s plans for his flying machines.
And all this for a stroll, a secondary function, not the great
dramatic spread and shadow of those pterodactyl wings.
This walking seems determined less by bird volition or
calculations of the small yellow eye than by an accident
of breeze, pushing the bird on a diagonal, the great feet executing
their tendus and lifts in the slowest of increments, hesitation
made exquisitely dimensional, as if the feet thought themselves
through each minute contribution to propulsion, these outsized
apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole,
these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail
their risen bird like useless bits of leather. Don’t show me
your soul, Balanchine used to say, I want to see your foot.
- Julie Bruck
Asking yourself, even the most mundane question, is like throwing the I Ching
The retreat is noisy
I walk downhill
towards the labyrinth and beseech the path
five times:
Tell me how an old man reaches
his authentic self?
Silently the path replies:
Your terrain is rocky.
One plods and plods,
sleeps and then plods some more.
Avoid fallen branches, but be sure
to gaze skyward through the leafless trees
way beyond the moon--
where trickster and saint
embrace in contentious paradox.
- Barry Denny
All the True Vows
All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.
There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.
Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.
Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.
Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen
nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.
By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.
Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,
it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.
Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you
and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,
that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.
I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.
Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years
in my own voice,
before it was too late
to turn my face again.
- David Whyte
To the New Year
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
- W.S. Merlin
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
I.
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood --
And gone are Phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
II.
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some Platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
IV.
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
V.
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
VI.
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
- William Butler Yeats
Twenty Hundred and Nineteen
Ah, Yeats, whom we had put away
with the old poems,
your lines carefully marked from
our study long ago
with the indomitable Ms. Elizabeth Drew
at the summer college
on the green Vermont hilltop,
so many lines part of our native tongue.
we scarcely remember it was you
who first told us “the center cannot hold.”
But now, “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen”
is put down before us
and we recognize once again
your prescient genius.
A century ago. To the year.
And now we read with new/old eyes
- Fran Claggett
Chicken Cosmology
Neither the chicken, nor the egg,
(since you asked). What came first was
the essential emptiness, the chickenless void.
Then a beak for pecking, followed by a tongue
for tasting, a gullet for swallowing, eyes for seeing,
legs and wings for fleeing all that is not-chicken,
and an anus to excrete it. Then came the chicken brain
for dividing the world into chicken-friend and chicken-foe.
Then the humans (at once both friend and foe)
came to feed the chickens and tend the coops and collect
the eggs, and wring an occasional chicken neck.
The humans thought that they came first, but the chickens
knew that the humans were after the eggs, which were
before the chickens (which hatched from them). But also
after the chickens (that laid them). Which for humans
is a conundrum. But not for chickens, who never ponder
which came first, because every chicken knows
that she came first, since everything in a chicken’s
universe is herself, not excluding the road, (which,
since you asked) the chicken crosses
to get to her better side.
- Richard Schiffman
Happy New Year
The party's done, the plastic cups used up -
the ones we never know whether to wash or throw away -
thus
ambivalence follows us
into the new year
starting with the cups.
But the feeling of being
together the best nourishment.
Although the food was also good.
My mother's traditional crab mousse
so fifties in flavor
Even the punch
a throwback to simpler days
when 3 kinds of sweet liquids mixed together
did not make us quake
with fear of the consequences.
There are of course big resolutions,
mostly the same
again and again
but the real joy comes
because I am just a bit calmer
a bit better at riding the waves
of my own tumultuous inner oceans
the steady inner core
like a steel rod liquid channel of awareness
quicksilver river of my dreams
is easier to hold onto
an alabaster bannister
in the storm of life.
My teacher brings out the poetry in me
like a doctor
extracts the built up fluids under the skin.
All these words accumulated from years
of picking at the scabs and neglecting
to clean old wounds.
Now they arise as the elixir of life,
the cream that rises to the top,
the honey sequestered in the flower
the scent of sprouted white narcissus on the driveway.
And I respond to welcome the new year with this poem.
- Basha/Barbara Hirschfeld
Basha/Barbara Hirschfeld
Fantasia: Firezone
In the bedroom
we awake
to smokedark
ceiling cracks
and walk
upside down
to the curtains.
In the kitchen
we eat
burned fennel,
smoked ham
and toast.
In the sink
we spy two singed
swans on a raft
of orange sponges
then watch them
fly through open
patio doors
toward a horizon
dulled by ash.
On the deck
we take a toy train
on miniature
bonerail tracks
past trolls incinerated
beneath Lego bridges.
In the driveway
we enter
a blistered bandshell
where a chorus
chants that to
the northeast
an inferno
is 10% contained.
In the garage
we test the
air purifier,
re-inflate
the zeppelin
and stock
firewalking
boots rated
at 500 degrees
Fahrenheit.
In the airship
we head west
to the Pacific
to join
a school of
of fire eels
and swim
toward Japan.
- David Beckman
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
- Donald Hall
Wall, that vile wall
"The wall, my wall, he says,
"We are invaded by the poor,
the forsaken, the persecuted,
the children. No matter the cost
we have to protect our border."
Set on his wall nothing is more important to him;
it rises & stretches in his imagination —
crosses deserts, divides plains & mountains,
separates parents from children, cuts
the primordial routes of the deer & the cougar,
ocelot & coyote, jaguar & wolf — his beautiful wall
that not even Joshua's trumpets could bring down.
"My wall, my wall!" he throws a tantrum
& to get it paralyses the government,
sinks the economy, sulks like the foolish brat
he is, obstinate on his wall cost what it may
in money, in blood, in death, in suffering.
The wall, that vile wall.
El muro, mi muro — dice
— nos invaden los pobres.
los desamparados, los perseguidos,
los niños. No importa el costo;
tenemos que proteger nuestra frontera.
Terco en su muro nada le es más importante;
se alza y se alarga en su imaginación —
cruza desiertos, divide llanos y cerros,
separa padres de hijos. Corta
las rutas primordiales del venado y la puma,
ocelote y coyote, lobo y jaguar — su bello muro
que ni las trompetas de Josué puedan derribar.
¡Mi muro, mi muro! hace berrinche
y para conseguirlo paraliza al gobierno,
hunde la economía, se atufa como el mocoso necio
que es, aferrado a su muro cueste lo que cueste
en dinero, en sangre, en muerte, en sufrir.
El muro, ese asqueroso muro.
- Rafael Jesús González
Bravo! Well doneQuote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Bravo!!
Well done.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
On The Cost of Written Language
Once upon a time
we knew the dancers inside water,
could name each one
by her seven names.
We knew the alphabet
of red sea stars, deer tracks
in the mud and the curl of Scorpio
in the August night.
By what magic
did such spirit turn to silence?
what convinced us
to trade ears for eyes,
fluid thoughts
for scratches of ink,
summer voices
for black forests bounded
by rectangular horizons?
What insect has eaten the green leaves,
while the newspaper
spreads its daily silence,
pages falling softy like snow,
with a muffled hiss?
Fascinated we gaze
endlessly into this mirror we’ve made,
reflections struggling for breath
beneath the surface, hiding like coral
inside the calcified skeletons
of our ancestors?
- Arthur Dawson
Those who Call themselves Elder
I dreamt of the gray-haired amongst us
who carry aloft on long dominant arms
huge beams of salient energy – cambers of their lives
congruent and cherished curves
resting on old-world joists
Their arms shone as light refracted
against a hovel of clouds
like aroused hues captured
after a long flight
as the craft descends
piercing amber and unstable air
dancing with lift while holding dew and place
Such light shivers alive
unaccustomed to being disturbed
let alone witnessed in beauty
or in reverence
I dreamt these gray-haired ones
spoke far less often
preoccupied perhaps with
readying themselves
for unfamiliar rituals
Their soft eyes gaze pass the horizon
landing on new light
blurred to the vision
of dragons
or dragonflies
Awake now to their prestige of instinct
awake now to the great unknown
- P. Gregory Guss
Ripening
The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done,
as much as by what we intend.
Our hair turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!
- Wendell Berry
Sonoma County Winter
Onward through this wonderfully dreary day
Gray clouds, low and wind-driven
speak of things I cannot name.
Rain drips through bare limbs
into the greening earth, and
I am amazed to be cold, wet, and
so vibrantly alive.
Let December know
its cold reach has fallen short.
Inside, inside . . . spring!
- Karl Frederick
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.