being poetry

Long afternoon at the edge of little sister pond

As for life,
I'm humbled,
I'm without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen -
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort -
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can't wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?

by Mary Oliver

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
being-knowing

by Mary Oliver

~

….one night
there’s a heartbeat at the door.
Outside, a woman in the fog,
with hair of twigs and a dress of weed,
dripping green lake water.
She says, “I am you,
and I have travelled a long distance.
Come with me, there is something I must show you….”
She turns to go, her cloak falls open,
Suddenly, golden light…..everywhere, golden light…

by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes

Genuine broken heart

In the very middle of the chest, deep deep inside
Something has broken
And it hurts almost all the time.
Sometimes it gives birth to anxiety, fear, and panic.
Sometimes it gives birth to anger, resentment and blame.
Sometimes it gives birth to tears.
This is our kinship with all who have loved truly –
From beginningless time.
You, my dear friend, understand it well
this genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion.
It humbles The Arrogant and soften The Unkind.
This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great
Fearlessness.
It awakens those who prefer to sleep and pierces through
Indifference.
This continual ache of the human heart –
Broken by the Loss of all that we hold dear
Is this not a blessing
Which when accepted fully – can be shared
With all?

by Pema Chödrön

~

I said to my soul, be still
And wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
Wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing
There is yet faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting

Wait without thought
For you are not yet ready for thought
So the darkness shall be the light
And the stillness the dancing.

by T.S. Elliot

~

turned outward and not toward
the stuff of my life,
letting it all spill over me.
i allow it to be, for once
not trying to put it to order,
for once (not) in the posture
of a person about to depart.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

by David Whyte

This world

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open
and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence.
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we're not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

by Mary Oliver

The Buddha's last instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire -
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

by Mary Oliver

Requiem of cycles and dreaming

Sometimes the mesh that holds life together bends under a weight.
It isn't like stone, or granite, or slate.
It isn't like the weight of all the ice that's melting left and right.
It isn't like the fragile gravity that keeps us all held like children in our mother's embrace.
It is a weight that goes against the soft flow of all that is sweet and natural.
Arcane energies are bubbling up again --
unexamined
untransformed
recurring antecedents
in this our shared curriculum of Dark Learning.
I feel that weight in this pain-racked body.
I see that weight in the slumped spines
and down-turned eyes
of the people I pass
who've forgotten their beauty,
who are filled with fears they don't belong.
When men and women and whole cultures forget to do their Shadow Work
the unseen helpers and healers are chased out of the village.
Pain-Demons slip in,
and they aim to do nothing
but knock down the shrines that hold us together.
When a Dark Age arrives, we have to call on the old travelers for aid,
and you and me
as much as we
would have this leg of our journey be
one lived with more peace and soft sovereignty
are wandering through a Dark Age now.
When a Dark Age arrives, we have to call on the old travelers for aid.
Persephone knows the road down and back.
Fudo knows how to sit in the fire and burn away these impurities.
Odin knows how to hang by the World Tree and see a new vision in time's great mirror.
Lao Tzu knows the way to restore balance to body and mind.
Aceso, Asclepius, Ratri, Shalim
and a million and one other guides of healing and dreaming
are waiting for the fires and candles to be lit
are waiting for the calling-songs to be lifted
are waiting for the animal dances
to mark another season of driving pain out of the body through the body itself.
The old ones say
when we get to the point where we can't even name our shared ailment
the only antidote is to pick a night and call-in a new dream together,
and since the whole world has grown tired of holding up these banners of war
let that night be this one.

by Frank Owen Jr

Anam Cara

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

by John O'Donohue

The seven of pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes

by Marge Piercy

If you knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

by Ellen Bass

~

i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

by e.e. cummings

~

to be nobody-but-yourself
in a world which is doing its best
night and day, to make you everybody else
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting

by e.e. cummings

How to be happy

Another Memo to Myself

You start with your own body
then move outward, but not too far.
Never try to please a city, for example.
Nor will the easy intimacy
in small towns ever satisfy that need
you have only whispered in the dark.
A woman is a beginning.
She need not be pretty, but must know
how to make her own ceilings
out of all that's beautiful in her.
Together you must love to exchange
gifts in the night, and agree
on the superfluity of ribbons,
the fine violence of breaking out
of yourselves. No matter,
it's doubtful she will be enough for you,
or you for her. You must have friends
of both sexes. When you get together
you must feel everyone has brought
his fierce privacy with him
and is ready to share it. Prepare
yourself though to keep something back;
there's a center in you
you are simply a comedian
without. Beyond this, it's advisable
to have a skill. Learn how to make something:
food, a shoe box, a good day.
Remember, finally, there are few pleasures
that aren't as local as your fingertips.
Never go to Europe for a cathedral.
In large groups, create a corner
in the middle of the room.

by Stephen Dunn

When I am old

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples’ gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirt and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay the rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe we ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

by Jenny Joseph

The layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

by Stanley Kunitz

The bud

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow of the flower,
and retell it in words and in touch,
it is lovely,
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

by Galway Kinnell

Tonight

I want you to feel the blurred edge
between good and bad,
to say no to the urge to look away
or to take sides…
but to give
with both eyes

by Ian McCallum

~

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?

by Rainer Maria Rilke

~

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Hokusai says

Hokusai says look carefully.
he says pay attention, notice.
he says keep looking, stay curious.
he says there is no end to seeing.

he says look forward to getting old.
he says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
he says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

he says keep doing what you love.
he says keep praying.

he says everyone of us is a child,
everyone of us is ancient,
everyone of us has a body.
he says everyone of us is frightened.
he says everyone of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

he says everything is alive —
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
water is alive.

everything has its own life.

everything lives inside us.

he says live in the world inside you.

he says it doesn’t matter if you draw,
or write books. it doesn’t matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.
it doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
it matters that you care.

it matters that you feel.

it matters that you notice.

it matters that life lives through you.

contentment is life living through you.
joy is life living through you.
satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.

he says don’t be afraid.
don’t be afraid.

love, feel, let life take you by the hand.

let life live through you.

by Roger S. Keyes