p

Because we spill not only milk

 

 

Because we spill not only milk

Knocking it over with an elbow

When we reach to wipe a small face

But also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn't,

And also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light

How much is gone and we hadn't intended it

Because we tear not only cloth

Thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole

But also tear friendships when we grow

And whole mountainsides because we are so many

And we want to live right where black oaks lived,

Once very quietly and still

Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen

And have to go back to the room we were in before,

Remember why it was we left

But also forget entire lexicons of joy

And how we lost ourselves for hours

Yet all that time were clearly found and held

And also forget the hungry not at our table

Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze

And precious papers left in rain

But also at legs that no longer walk

Or never did, although from the outside they look like most others

And also weep at words said once as though

They might be rearranged but which

Once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless

Because we are imperfect and love so

Deeply we will never have enough days,

We need the gift of starting over, beginning

Again: just this constant good, this

Saving hope.

 

~ Nancy Shaffer ~

 

q

We are visitors on this planet.  We are here for ninety, a hundred years at very most.  During that period we must try to do something good, something useful with our lives.  Try to be at peace with yourself and help others, share that peace.  If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.

        Tenzin Gyaltso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

 

p

Rejoicing with Henry

Not that he holds with church, but Henry goes
Christmas morning in a tantrum of snow,
Henry, who's eighty-two and has no kin
and doesn't feature prayer, but likes the singing.

By afternoon the sun is visible,
a dull gun-metal glint. We come to call
bearing a quart of home-made wine a mile
and leading Babe, our orphaned hand-raised foal.

This gladdens Henry, who stumps out to see
Babe battle the wooden bridge. Will she
or won't she? Vexed with a stick she leaps across
and I'm airborne as well. An upstate chorus
on Henry's radio renders loud
successive verses of "Joy to the World."

In spite of all the balsam growing free
Henry prefers a store-bought silver tree.
It's lasted him for years, the same
crimped angel stuck on top. Under, the same
square box from the Elks. Most likely shaving cream,
says Henry, who seldom shaves or plays the host.

Benevolent, he pours the wine. We toast
the holiday, the filly beating time
in his goat shed with her restive hooves. That's youth
says Henry when we go to set her loose,
Never mind. Next year, if I live that long,
she'll stand in the shafts. Come Christmas Day
we'll drive that filly straight to town.
Worth waiting for, that filly. Nobody says

the word aloud: Rejoice. We plod
home tipsily and all uphill to boot,
the pale day fading as we go
leaving our odd imprints in the snow
to mark a little while the road
ahead of night's oncoming thick clubfoot.

 

Maxine Kumin

q

 

Dear Friends,

I apologize for the hiatus.  I have been experiencing some upheaval in my life and so have not been able to attend to my ps and qs.  Thank you for your patience.  I hope that from here on, I will be able to be back on track.

I will you all the best during this holiday season, whatever you may be celebrating – or not, as the case may be.

Stephen

 

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others.  And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

                        Etty Hillesum, “An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943”

 

q

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best you have to give.

        Eleanor Roosevelt.

q

A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next.  We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe.  But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty.  This not-knowing is part of the adventure.

        Pema Chodron

p

The Apple Orchard

Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

(Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. by Albert Ernest Flemming)

 

q

It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else made it.

    Sophocles

p

Characters

Aunt Duly is here wallpapering our kitchen.
She is seventy-one years old
but still paints silos and moves pianos.
If I bet her, she will touch her palms
to the floor without bending her knees.

When she first sees me, long hair and beard,
she comes down the ladder waving her brush:
"Judas Priest, Kev, when I was a girl,
they used to beat guys like you with chairs."

She has been going up and down this last hour
as if her ladder is an escalator,
telling me about drunken gravediggers
or the grocer who wouldn't serve lawyers.
I'm afraid she'll slip or faint,

but she is coming down the ladder,
telling me about Barney Ruckle in the back pew
quietly mocking each bead during the rosary:
"Gimme a nickel, Mary. Gimme a nickel, Mary.
Gimme a nickel ..."

Going up the ladder
because she really does have work to do,
she pauses halfway and says,
"You know, they're all dead now,
all those characters who used to make us laugh."

 

Kevin FitzPatrick

 

q

You can always tell a real friend; when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

 

        Laurence J. Peter

q

Only in darkness can you see the stars.

    Martin Luther King, Jr.

p

Brahms

It must be that my early friendship with defeat
Has given me affection for the month of August.
The potato fields belong to early night.

So many times as a boy I sat in the dirt
Among dry cornstalks that gave assurances
Every hour that Francis has his ear to the night.

Columbus's letters tell us that we will receive
The gifts that mariners all receive at the end—
Memories of gold and a grave in the sand.

The shadow of a friend's hand gives us
Promises similar to those we received from
The light under the door as our mother came near.

Each of us is a Jacob weeping for Joseph.
We are the sparrow that flies through the warrior's
Hall and back out into the falling snow.

I don't know why these images should please me
So much; an angel said: "In the last moment before night
Brahms will show you how loyal the notes are.

 

Robert Bly

p

Nativity

 

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?

just to hear his sister

promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,

just to hear his brother say,

a house inside a house,

but most of all to hear his mother answer,

One more song, then you go to sleep.

 

How could anyone in that bed guess

the question finds its beginning

in the answer long growing

inside the one who asked, that restless boy,

the night’s darling?

 

Later, a man lying awake,

he might ask it again,

just to hear the silence

charge him, This night

arching over your sleepless wondering,

 

this night, the near ground

every reaching-out-to overreaches,

 

just to remind himself

out of what little earth and duration,

out of what immense good-bye,

 

each must make a safe place of his heart,

before so strange and wild a guest

as God approaches.

 

            Li-young Lee

q

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled in not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

                                 Wendell Berry

p

Sonnet 73

 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereupon it must expire,

Consumed with that with which it was nourished by.

    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

 

        William Shakespeare

p

The Dry Salvages
(excerpt)

Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into indifferent lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of man may be intent
At the time of death" - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which will fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare Forward.
                             O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination."
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
                                         Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

~ T.S. Eliot ~

q

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

        Charles Dubois

q

Don't be afraid that your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.

        Grace Hansen

p

Earth Dweller

It was all the clods at once become

precious; it was the barn, and the shed,

and the windmill, my hands, the crack

Arlie made in the axe handle: oh, let me stay

here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;

let the sun casually rise and set.

If I have not found the right place,

teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are

vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing

for the saints forever, the shed and the windmill

rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now, I know why people worship, carry around

magic emblems, wake up talking dreams

they teach to their children: the world speaks.

The world speaks everything to us.

It is our only friend.

William Stafford

q

Things are not what they seem to be; nor are they otherwise.

            Lankavatara Sutra

 

Dishwater

Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.

 

            Ted Kooser

 

q

Everything you've learned in school as `obvious' becomes less and less

obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no

solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are

no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

-R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)

p

A Ballad of Going Down to the Store

 

First I went down to the street

by means of the stairs,

just imagine it,

by means of the stairs.

 

Then people know to people unknown

passed me by and I passed them by.

Regret

that you did not see

how people walk,

regret!

 

I entered a complete store;

lamps of glass were glowing,

I saw somebody – he sat down –

and what did I hear?  what did I hear?

rustling of bags and human talk.

 

And indeed,

indeed,

I returned.

 

Miron Bialoszewski (trans. By Czeslaw Milosz)

 

q

There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

p

Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

~ Richard Wilbur ~

 

q

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation.  The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

            James Baldwin

 

p

For the Anniversary of My Death

 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When  the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

 

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

 

                        W. S. Merwin

 

The trouble is that you think you have time.

                        Jack Kornfield

 

After Years

 

Today, from a distance, I saw you

walking away, and without a sound

the glittering face of a glacier

slid into the sea.  An ancient oak

fell in the Cumberlands, holding only

a handful of leaves, and an old woman

scattering corn to her chickens looked up

for an instant.  At the other side

of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times

the size of our own sun exploded

and vanished, leaving a small green spot

on the astronomer’s retina

as he stood in the great open dome

of my heart with no one to tell.

 

                        Ted Kooser

 

q

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness, but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

 

                        ~ Aleksander Solzhenitsyn ~

Twilight: After Haying

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed—
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
—sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen ... the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses ...

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

 

Jane Kenyon

Letting Go in the Dawnlight

 

Let go, Tom, let your saddle and bridle go.

Let go, Tom, of all the men and women you were.

Let go, Tom, of who we all were together,

Carousing, drinking, telling lies, and funny stories,

Turn your best horses out to pasture, Tom.

See those blue mountain ranges lying in the dawnlight.

They’re where we all began and where we all will go.

Let go of the Animas Mountains, Tom.

Let go of Indian Canyon, let go of the old Adobe Camp.

Let go of the Godfrey, let go of the Lynch.

All of your friends are waiting there,

By those blue mountain ranges, lying in the dawnlight.

They’re waiting to take you in.

Let go, Tom, let go, Tom, let go, Tom

Let go.

 

(Tom was a Grey Ranch cowboy from 1960 to 2002)

 

                        Drum Hadley

 

q

Don't be afraid that your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.

        Grace Hansen

 

Only by living completely in the world can on learn to believe.  One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself - even to make of oneself a righteous person.

        Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

q

What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

        Crowfoot (a Blackfoot Indian)  1821-1890

p

WHAT HAVE I LEARNED

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

-the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs
to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,

you pass it on.

        Gary Snyder

 

p

WHAT HAVE I LEARNED

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

-the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs
to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,

you pass it on.

        Gary Snyder

 

q

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my ax.

        Abraham Lincoln

p

Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

 

q

We didn't inherit the land from our fathers.  We are borrowing it from our children.

        Amish saying

p

A Map to the Next World

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map
for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields,
from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light.
It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land,
how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money.
They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a fog steals our children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the monsters are born there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here,
how to speak to them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map.
Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us,
leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood,
your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine --
a spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death,
smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast
of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X,
no guide book with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history,
a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers
where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth
who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

~ Joy Harjo ~

q

You don't get to choose how you are going to die, or when.  You can only decide how you're going to live.  Now.

        Joan Baez

p

The Hungry Ghost

 

The president is on TV just now waving the flag,

explaining how we must be brave and send our young boys

to die

in order to protect this flag, and he

points to it, there on the wall

a big red white and blue flag.

He’s got a tiny one pinned to his lapel

 

and in the audience hundreds of people cheer

and wave little cloth flags back at him.

Oh my, after 10,000 years of this, after

generation upon generation upon generation

of young boys marching to their deaths, how

can we not know that the flags are always changing

with the arbitrary lines they draw on a map?

 

After 10,000 years of bloody death,

after 100 million dead in the twentieth century,

the bloodiest century in the history of mankind,

how can we not yet see that standing behind every flag

is the Hungry Ghost

starving for our juicy emotions, our fear and hatred,

mouth watering for the next course of young boys and

 

we wave the flag, we

cheer and scream and weep and pull our hair and

we send them rank and file by the millions

marching straight into the oven to be roasted

while the Hungry Ghost stands by exhorting us,

in one hand a sharpened boning knife,

in the other

 

a flag.

 

                        redhawk  

 

Stephen Wilder

Mary McDowell Center for Learning

20 Bergen St.

Brooklyn, NY 11201

stephenw@mmcl.net

718 625-3939

 

q

He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

        -Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)

p

Satchel Paige

 

A good argument can be made that

he was the greatest pitcher who ever lived and

one of the cornerstones of that argument

 

would be what happened in 1942

when the greatest hitter in Negro League history,

Josh Gibson, faced the greatest pitcher, Satch.

 

Paige was skinny with legs as long as Pine trees

and Gibson had a barrel chest and shoulders

2 yards wide, thickly muscled hams for biceps

 

and his menacing crouch at the plate was feared

by every pitcher in the game save one:  Satchel;

he wanted Josh

 

and in that historic game he

wanted him bad enough that he

walked 2 men to fill the bases so he

 

could pitch to Josh and then

he called out to the greatest hitter in baseball

exactly what he was going to throw and

 

struck Gibson out

on 3 straight

pitches;

 

a good argument

can be made and

that was Satchel’s argument.

 

            redhawk

 

q

 

Only by living completely in the world can on learn to believe.  One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself - even to make of oneself a righteous person.

        Dietrich Bonhoeffer

p

Remembrance of Karen

 

She dances to music

                        whether or not we can hear it.

Her smile proclaims the joy within;

                        it wells up and overflows into movement ~                                               

                                                DANCING!

Joy that will not be diminished;

                        like the sun

                        it warms the weary hearts around her.

Bright eyes match the bright colors she loves.

Her soul feasts on simple pleasures:

                        colorful magazines

                        a baby to cuddle

                        special friends

                        paper in her shoe.

Her heart will not contain her love—

                        it spills over onto anyone in her path

                                    with hugs and smiles.

     (the body, bent and bald, matters not)

Her beauty comes from within.

 

                Ruth Hansen ~ March 2, 2007

 

q

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.

    -Roger Miller, musician (1936-1992)

 

p

The Dream of the Marsh Wren:

Reciprocal Creation

 

The marsh wren, furtive and tail-tipped,

by the rapid brown blurs of his movements

makes sense of the complexities of sticks

and rushes.  He makes slashes and complicated

lines of his own in mid-air above the marsh

by his flight and the rattles of his incessant

calling.  He exists exactly as if he were a product

of the pond and the sky and the blades of light

among the reeds and grasses, as if he were

deliberately willed into being by the empty

spaces he eventually inhabits.

 

And at night, inside each three-second

shudder of his sporadic sleep, understand

how he creates the vision of the sun

blanched and barred by the diagonal juttings

of the weeds, and then the sun as heavy

cattail crossed and tangled and rooted

deep in the rocking of its own gold water,

and then the sun as suns in flat explosions

at the bases of the tule.  Inside the blink

of his eyelids, understand how he composes

the tule dripping sun slowly in gold rain

off its black edges, and how he composes

gold circles widening on the blue surface

of the sun's pond, and the sharp black

slicing of his wing rising against the sun,

and that same black edge skimming the thin

corridor of gold between sky and pond.

 

Imagine the marsh wren making himself

inside his own dream.  Imagine the wren,

created by the marsh, inside the marsh

of his own creation, unaware of his being

inside this dream of mine where I imagine

he dreams within the boundaries of his own

fixed black eye around which this particular

network of glistening weeds and knotted

grasses and slow-dripping gold mist

and seeded winds shifting in waves of sun

turns and tangles and turns itself completely

inside out again here composing me

in the stationary silence of its only existence.

 

    Pattiann Rogers

q

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham.

    -Anna Sewell, writer (1820-1878)

 

 

p

In the Middle of the Road

 

In the middle of the road there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

there was a stone

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

 

Never should I forget this event

in the life of my fatigued retinas.

Never should I forget that in the middle of the road

there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

 

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (trans. by Elizabeth bishop)

p

Living

 

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems

each summer the last summer.

 

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun,

each day the last day.

 

A red salamander

so cold and so

easy to catch, dreamily

 

moves his delicate feet

and long tail.  I hold

my hand open for him to go.

 

Each minute the last minute.

 

    Denise Levertov

 

q

I know what the great cure is:  it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.

    Henry Miller

 

q

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river.

    Ghalib

 

p

 City of My Youth

 

It would be more decorous not to live.  To live is not decorous,

Says he who after many years

Returned to the city of his youth.  There was no one left

Of those who once walked these streets.

And now they had nothing, except his eyes.

Stumbling, he walked and looked, instead of them,

On the light they had loved, on the lilacs again in bloom.

His legs were, after all, more perfect

Than nonexistent legs.  His lungs breathed in air

As is usual with the living.  His heart was beating,

Surprising him with its beating, in his body

Their blood flowed, his arteries fed them with oxygen.

He felt, inside, their livers, spleens, intestines.

Masculinity and femininity, elapsed, met in him

And every shame, every grief, every love.

If ever we accede to enlightenment,

He thought, it is in one compassionate moment

When what separated them from me vanishes

And a shower of drops from a bunch of lilacs

Pours on my face, and hers, and his, at the same time.

     

            Czeslaw Milosz  (trans. by the Author and Robert Hass)

 

 

q

It would imply the regeneration of mankind if they were to become elevated enough to truly worship sticks and stones.

    Henry David Thoreau

 

p

The Lanyard

 The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Billy Collins