A Violin At Dusk, Luzette Woodworth Reese

A Violin at Dusk by Lizette Woodworth Reese     Stumble to silence, all you uneasy things,  That pack the day with bluster and with fret.  For here is music at each window set;  Here is a cup which drips with all the springs  That ever bud a cowslip flower; a roof  To shelter till the argent weathers break;  A candle with enough of light to make  My courage bright against each dark reproof.  A hand's width of clear gold, unraveled out  The rosy sky, the little moon appears;  As they were splashed upon the paling red,  Vast, blurred, the village poplars lift about.  I think of young, lost things: of lilacs; tears;  I think of an old neighbor, long since dead.        Today's poem is in the public domain.

About This Poem  Lizette Woodworth Reese's poetry often evokes images of her rural childhood. This imagery along with her condensed form and colloquial language influenced younger poets, including Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan.

Prayer From A Mouse, Sarah Messer

Prayer from a Mouse

by Sarah Messer

Dimensionless One, can you hear me? 

Me with the moon ears, caught 

in ice branches? 

 

Beneath the sky's long house, 

beneath the old snake tree, 

I pray to see even a fragment 

of you-- 

whiskers ticking 

 

a deserted street, 

a staircase leading 

to the balcony 

of your collarbone. 

 

Beloved King of Stars, I cannot 

contain my animal movements. 

 

For you I stay like a mountain. 

For you I stay like a straight pin. 

 

But in the end, the body leaves us 

its empty building. 

 

Midnight petulant 

as a root cellar. Wasps crawling 

in sleeves. I sleep 

 

with my tail over 

my face, enflamed. 

 

Oh Great Cataloguer 

of Snow Leaves, I pray 

that you may appear 

and carry every piece 

of my fur in your hands.

A Book Said Dream And I Do, Barbara Ras

A Book Said Dream and I Do

by Barbara Ras

There were feathers and the light that passed through feathers.  

There were birds that made the feathers and the sun that made the light. 

The feathers of the birds. made the air soft, softer 

than the quiet in a cocoon waiting for wings,

 stiller than the stare of a hooded falcon. 

But no falcons in this green made by the passage of parents.

 No, not parents, parrots flying through slow sleep 

 casting green rays to light the long dream. 

 If skin, dew would have drenched it, but dust 

 hung in space like the stoppage of 

 time itself, which, after dancing with parrots, 

 had said, Thank you. I'll rest now. 

 It's not too late to say the parrot light was thick 

 enough to part with a hand, and the feathers softening 

 the path, fallen after so much touching of cheeks, 

 were red, hibiscus red split by veins of flight 

 now at the end of flying. 

 Despite the halt of time, the feathers trusted red 

and believed indolence would fill the long dream, 

 until the book shut and time began again to hurt.

Mansur al-Hallaj

You glide between the heart and its casing
By Mansur al- Hallaj
(9th Century)
English version by Bernard Lewis

You glide between the heart and its casing as tears glide from the eyelid.
You dwell in my inwardness, in the depths of my heart, as souls dwell in bodies.
Nothing passes from rest to motion unless you move it in hidden ways,
O new moon.

Perhaps by Shu Ting

Perhaps...

 

Perhaps these thoughts of ours 

will never find an audience 

Perhaps the mistaken road 

will end in a mistake 

Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time 

will be blown out, one at a time 

Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out 

without lighting a fire to warm us.

 

Perhaps when all the tears have been shed 

the earth will be more fertile 

Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun 

the sun will praise us in return 

Perhaps these heavy burdens 

will strengthen our philosophy 

Perhaps when we weep for those in misery 

we must be silent about miseries of our own

 

Perhaps 

Because of our irresistible sense of mission 

We have no choice

 

~ Shu Ting ~

 

(Translated by K. Kizer in Cool, Calm & Collected)

 

Sharon G. Thornton

Sharon G. Thornton

from "Broken Yet Beloved: A Pastoral Theology of the Cross"

(Chalice Press: 2002.  pp.61)

The cross simply calls us to take a stand, to break with the neutrality and passivity and account for whose side we are on.  In this way Paul's injunction "to take up your cross" is a call to join the struggle for justice.  Or as Soelle says, "Put yourself on the side of the damned of this world."

Douglas John Hall has called the theology of the cross the "thin tradition" that has always been present in some form through out the history of Christianity.  It has functioned to critique reigning ideologies and the church's tendency toward abuse.  He is not talking about times when the church has distorted the meaning of the cross and used it to subdue dissent or impose imperialistic aims.  Instead, a theology of the cross as the "thin tradition" offers an interpretive framework for entering into historical ambiguities in order to engage people who are suffering.  The "thin tradition" is a political interpretation of the cross.  Soelle rightly agrees, "The cross is the place where Christians stand when they begin to become aware of the civilization of injustice, and of estrangement as sin."

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Kindness

 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

 

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

 

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

 

(Words From Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Suddenly by Sharon Olds

Suddenly by Sharon Olds   (Ruth Stone, June 8, 1915 - November 19, 2011) And suddenly, it's today, it's this morning they are putting Ruth into the earth, her breasts going down, under the hill, like the moon and sun going down together. O I know, it's not Ruth--what was Ruth went out, slowly, but this was her form, beautiful and powerful as the old, gorgeous goddesses who were terrible, too, not telling a lie for anyone--and she'd been left here so long, among mortals, by her mate--who could not, one hour, bear to go on being human. And I've gone a little crazy myself with her going, which seems to go against logic, the way she has always been there, with her wonder, and her generousness, her breasts like two voluptuous external hearts. I am so glad she kept them, all her life, and she got to be buried in them-- she 96, and they maybe 82, each, which is 164 years of pleasure and longing.  And think of all the poets who have suckled at her riskiness, her risque, her body politic, her outlaw grace!  What she came into this world with, with a mew and cry, she gave us.  In her red sweater and her red hair and her raw melodious Virginia crackle, she emptied herself fully out into her songs and our song-making, we would not have made our songs without her. O dear one, what is this?  You are not a child, though you dwindled, you have not retraced your path, but continued to move straight forward to where we will follow you, radiant mother.  Red Rover, cross over.   Copyright © 2013 by Sharon Olds. Used with permission of the author.

About This Poem "When Ruth Stone, one of our great American poets, died, I was not able to get to Vermont for her burial. That morning, I sat by the window, over Riverside Drive, in New York City, and let my mind go, took off its collar and leash, and let it run--straight to her. All I asked of my mind was that it report back to me what it saw, what it thought and felt. After the poem was finished (by hand, by ballpoint in grocery-store notebook), and typed, and revised a little, it was ready to go out and seek other lovers of Ruth Stone's poems, with whom to observe and mourn her passing, and to praise her. Later I had the sorrowing joy of reading Toi Derricotte's story of her deep friendship with Ruth and her family, and of the day of the burial in her essay 'Ruth Stone's Funeral' which was published in Water-Stone Review, Volume 15, 2012. Thus do we all keep each other company."  --Sharon Olds

Wildpeace. (Yehuda Amichai)

 

Wildpeace

 

Not the peace of a cease-fire 

not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, 

but rather 

as in the heart when the excitement is over 

and you can talk only about a great weariness. 

I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. 

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows 

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. 

A peace 

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without 

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be 

light, floating, like lazy white foam. 

A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing? 

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation 

to the next, as in a relay race: 

the baton never falls.) 

 

Let it come 

like wildflowers, 

suddenly, because the field 

must have it: wildpeace. 

 

~ Yehuda Amichai ~

 

(The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)