q

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (1918-2008)

p

This poem was sent to me by a friend in response to the poem sent last
week.

This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.

A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.

Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,

When snow first fell, riding this way

He felt joy, strong, without reason,

Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm

Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,

Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.

He returns years later, has no demands.

He wants only one, most precious thing:

To see, purely and simply, without name,

Without expectations, fears, or hopes,

At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

Czeslaw Milosz trans. by Robert Hass

q

The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable.

-J.S. Buckminster, clergyman and editor (1797-1812)

q

To Autumn

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained

With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit

Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayst rest,

And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,

And all the daughters of the year shall dance!

Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

"The narrow bud opens her beauties to

The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;

Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and

Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,

Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,

And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

"The spirits of the air live on the smells

Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round

The gardens, or sits singing in the trees."

Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;

Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak

Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

William Blake

q

Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience,
your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.

-Jean Toomer, poet and novelist (1894-1967)

p

Assurance

 

You will never be alone, you hear so deep

a sound when autumn comes.  Yellow

pulls across the hills and thrums,

or the silence after lightening before it says

its names—and then the clouds' wide-mouthed

apologies.  You were aimed from birth:

you will never be alone.  Rain

will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles—you never hard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years.  You turn your head-

that's what the silence meant: you're not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.

 

            William Stafford

q

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each
other?

-George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)

p

Invisible Work

 

Because no one could ever praise me enough,

because I don't mean these poems only

but the unseen

unbelievable effort it takes to live

the life that goes on between them,

I think all the time about invisible work.

About the young mother on Welfare

I interviewed years ago,

who said, "It's hard.

You bring him to the park,

run rings around yourself keeping him safe,

cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,

and there's no one

to say what a good job you're doing,

how you were patient and loving

for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."

And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself

because I am lonely,

when all the while,

as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,

thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,

the slow, unglamorous work of healing,

the way worms in the garden

tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe

and bees ransack this world into being,

while owls and poets stalk shadows,

our loneliest labors under the moon.

 

There are mothers

for everything, and the sea

is a mother too,

whispering and whispering to us

long after we have stopped listening.

I stopped and let myself lean

a moment, against the blue

shoulder of the air. The work

of my heart

is the work of the world's heart.

There is no other art.

 

~ Alison Luterman ~

q

I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings
called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with
such things as crawl upon earth.

-Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)