Expect Nothing, Alice Walker

Expect Nothing

 

Expect nothing. Live frugally

On surprise.

Become a stranger

To need of pity

Or, if compassion be freely

Given out

Take only enough

Stop short of urge to plead

Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger

Than your own small heart

Or greater than a star;

Tame wild disappointment

With caress unmoved and cold

Make of it a parka

For your soul.

Discover the reason why

So tiny a human midget

Exists at all

So scared unwise

But expect nothing. Live frugally

On surprise.

 

~ Alice Walker ~

 

(Anything We Love Can Be Saved)

Notice, Steve Kowit

Notice

This evening, the sturdy Levi's

I wore every day for over a year

& which seemed to the end

in perfect condition,

suddenly tore.

How or why I don't know,

but there it was: a big rip at the crotch.

A month ago my friend Nick

walked off a racquetball court,

showered,

got into his street clothes,

& halfway home collapsed & died.

Take heed, you who read this,

& drop to your knees now & again

like the poet Christopher Smart,

& kiss the earth & be joyful,

& make much of your time,

& be kindly to everyone,

even to those who do not deserve it.

For although you may not believe 

it will happen,

you too will one day be gone,

I, whose Levi's ripped at the crotch

for no reason,

assure you that such is the case.

Pass it on.

 

~ Steve Kowit ~

 

(The Dumbbell Nebula)

 

Birdng At The Dairy, Sidney Wade

Birding at the Dairy  

by Sidney Wade

 

 

We're searching
for the single

yellow-headed
blackbird

we've heard
commingles

with thousands
of starlings

and brown-headed
cowbirds,

when the many-
headed body

arises
and undulates,

a sudden congress
of wings

in a maneuvering
wave that veers

and wheels, a fleet
and schooling swarm

in synchronous alarm,
a bloom radiating

in ribbons, in sheets,
in waterfall,

a murmuration
of birds

that turns
liquid in air,

that whooshes
like waves

on the shore,
or the breath

of a great
seething prayer.

Today, Mary Oliver

Today

by Mary Oliver

Today I'm flying low and I'm
not saying a word.
I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I'm taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

"Today" by Mary Oliver from A Thousand Mornings. © The Penguin Press, 2012

A Rainy Morning, Ted Kooser

A Rainy Morning

by Ted Kooser

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

"A Rainy Morning" by Ted Kooser from Delights & Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press, 2004

The Blessings do Earthiness: The Next Step, Neil Douglas-Klotz

The Blessings of Earthiness: The Next Step

 

 

(a meditation on Psalms 23)

 

Hawvlan lachma d'sunqanan yaomana

 

(KJV version: Give us this day our daily bread)

 

Grant what we need each day in bread and insight:

subsistence for the call of

growing life.

 

Give us the food we need to grow

through each new day,

through each illumination of life's needs.

 

Let the measure of our need be earthiness:

give all things simple, verdant,

passionate.

 

Produce in us, for us, the possible:

each only-human step toward home

lit up.

 

Help us fulfill what lies within

the circle of our lives: each day we ask

no more, no less.

 

Animate the earth within us: we then

feel the Wisdom underneath

supporting all.

 

Generate through us the bread of life:

we hold only what is asked to feed

the next mouth.

 

Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.

 

~ Neil Douglas-Klotz ~

 

 

 

(Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus)

An Exquisite Truth, Hsu Yun

An Exquisite Truth By Hsu Yun (1839 - 1959) This is an exquisite truth: Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start. Inquiring about a difference Is like asking to borrow string when you've got a good strong rope. Every Dharma is known in the heart. After a rain, the mountain colors intensify. Once you become familiar with the design of fate's illusions Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

Earth Song

Earth Song

 

Listen to things more often than beings.

Hear the voice of the fire, hear the voice of the water,

Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:

This is the ancestors breathing. 

Those who are dead are never gone;

The dead are not down in the earth:

They are in the trembling of the trees,

In the groaning of the woods,

In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps,

They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;

They are in the woman's breast, they are in the wailing of a child,

They are in the burning log and in the moaning rock.

They are in the weeping grasses, in the forest and the home.

Listen to things more often than beings.

Hear the voice of fire, hear the voice of water.

Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush. 

This is the ancestors breathing. 

 

 

(Traditional from Senegal, translator unknown)

 

Wayfarer, Antonio Machado

Wayfarer, the only way 

is your footsteps, there is no other. 

 

Wayfarer, there is no way, 

you make the way by walking. 

As you go, you make the way 

and stopping to look behind, 

you see the path that your feet 

will never travel again. 

 

Wayfarer, there is no way - 

Only foam trails to the sea.

 

~ Antonio Machado ~ 

 

(Selected Poems, trans. by A. Trueblood)

Bring All Of Yourself To His Door, Hakim Sanai

Bring all of yourself to his door
By Hakim Sanai
(1044? - 1150?)
English version by D.L. Pendlebury

Bring all of yourself to his door:
bring only a part,
and you've brought nothing at all.

In Praise Of The Earth, John O'Donohue

In Praise of the Earth

Let us bless

The imagination of the Earth.

That knew early the patience

To harness the mind of time,

Waited for the seas to warm,

Ready to welcome the emergence

Of things dreaming of voyaging

Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse

The growth until the face of the Earth

Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came

And sealed the Earth inside

An endless coma of cold,

The heart of the Earth held hope,

Storing fragments of memory,

Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth

That offers ground for home

And holds our feet firm

To walk in space open

To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence

And certainty of mountains:

Their sublime stillness,

Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden

Trusting the first warmth of spring

Until its black infinity of cells

Becomes charged with dream;

Then the silent, slow nurture

Of the seed's self, coaxing it

To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth

That transfigures all

That has fallen

Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,

Opening to receive

Our worn forms

Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth

For all our sins against her:

For our violence and poisonings

Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us

The ancient clay,

Holding the memory of seasons,

The passion of the wind,

The fluency of water,

The warmth of fire,

The quiver-touch of the sun

And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,

To live to the full

The dream of the Earth

Who chose us to emerge

And incarnate its hidden night

In mind, spirit, and light.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)

To subscribe to Panhala, send a blank email to Panhala-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To unsubscribe from Panhala, send a blank email to Panhala-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

__._,_.___

Reply via web post

Reply to sender

Reply to group

Start a New Topic

Messages in this topic(4)

VISIT YOUR GROUP 

• New Members 11

• Privacy • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use

.

 

__,_._,___

The New Song, w.S. Merwin

The New Song

by W. S. Merwin

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

Earth Your Dancing Place, May Swenson

Earth Your Dancing Place

 

Beneath heaven's vault

remember always walking

through halls of cloud

down aisles of sunlight

or through high hedges

of the green rain

walk in the world

highheeled with swirl of cape

hand at the swordhilt

of your pride

Keep a tall throat

Remain aghast at life

 

Enter each day

as upon a stage

lighted and waiting

for your step

Crave upward as flame

have keenness in the nostril

Give your eyes

to agony or rapture

 

Train your hands

as birds to be

brooding or nimble

Move your body

as the horses

sweeping on slender hooves

over crag and prairie

with fleeing manes

and aloofness of their limbs

 

Take earth for your own large room

and the floor of earth

carpeted with sunlight

and hung round with silver wind

for your dancing place

 

~ May Swenson ~

 

 

(Nature: Poems Old and New)

 

Blessing the Bread, Lynn Unger

Blessing the Bread

 

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam,

hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz.

 

Surely the earth

is heavy with this rhythm,

the stretch and pull of bread,

the folding in and folding in

across the palms, as if

the lines of my hands could chart

a map across the dough,

mold flour and water into

the crosshatchings of my life.

 

I do not believe in palmistry,

but I study my hands for promises

when no one is around.

I do not believe in magic.

But I probe the dough

for signs of life, willing

it to rise, to take shape,

to feed me. I do not believe

in palmistry, in magic, but

something happens in kneading

dough or massaging flesh;

an imprint of the hand remains

on the bodies we have touched.

 

This is the lifeline --

the etched path from hand

to grain to earth, the transmutation

of the elements through touch

marking the miracles

on which we unwillingly depend.

 

Praised be thou, eternal God,

who brings forth bread from the earth.

 

~ Lynn Ungar ~

Anima Christi

Anima Christi

Soul of Christ, sanctify me

Body of Christ, save me

Blood of Christ, inebriate me

Water from the side of Christ, wash me

Passion of Christ, strengthen me

O good Jesus, hear me

Within Thy wounds hide me

Separated from Thee let me never be ("Permit me not to be separated from Thee")

From the malicious enemy defend me ("From the malignant enemy defend me")

In the hour of my death call me

And bid me come unto Thee

That I may praise Thee with Thy saints ("That with thy Saints I may praise Thee")

Forever and ever

Amen

An a Ancient Celtic Prayer for sleep, Esther de Waal

Untitled (An ancient Celtic prayer for sleep)

O Jesu without sin,
King of the poor,
Who were sorely subdued
Under the ban of the wicked,
Shield Thou me this night
From Judas.

My soul on Thine own arm, O Christ,
Thou the King of the City of Heaven,
Thou it was who bought’st my soul O Jesu,
Thou it was who didst sacrifice Thy life for me.

Protect Thou me because of my sorrow,
For the sake of Thy passion, Thy wounds, and Thy blood,
And take me in safety to-night
Near to the City of God.

From The Celtic Way of Prayer by Esther de Waal, Doubleday, 1997.

Descending Theology: The Garden, by Mary Karr

Descending a Theology: the Garden

by Mary Karr

We know he was a man because, once doomed,
he begged for reprieve. See him
grieving on his rock under olive trees,
his companions asleep
on the hard ground around him
wrapped in old hides.
Not one stayed awake as he’d asked.
That went through him like a sword.
He wished with all his being to stay
but gave up
bargaining at the sky. He knew
it was all mercy anyhow,
unearned as breath. The Father couldn’t intervene,
though that gaze was never
not rapt, a mantle around him. This
was our doing, our death.
The dark prince had poured the vial of poison
into the betrayer’s ear,
and it was done. Around the oasis where Jesus wept,
the cracked earth radiated out for miles.
In the green center, Jesus prayed for the pardon
of Judas, who was approaching
with soldiers, glancing up–as Christ was–into
the punctured sky till his neck bones
ached. Here is his tear-riven face come
to press a kiss on his brother.

Descending Theology: the Resurrection, Mary Karr

Descending Theology: The Resurrection BY MARY KARR From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse's core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest's door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it's your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way.

Etta's Elegy, Maureen Seaton

Etta’s Elegy Maureen Seaton

for Etta Silver (1913–2013) This is where the poem holds its breath, where the usable truth sways, sorrowing,   and the people sway with the truth of it, and this is where the poem enters the dark.   This is where the book closes and the clock opens and the clock closes and the book   opens to song so the snow geese murmur and the coyote swaggers along the aspens.   This is where the geese fly unabashedly out, and the sky turns white and wild with sound.   This is where tumult, this is where prophecy. This is where the poem repents of language.   This is where the poem enters silence, where the child holds the book in her lap   whose pages are aflame with life, whose song sways with a usable truth, sorrowing.   And this is where the poem holds its breath, and this is where the poem enters the dark.   This is where it leaps wild about the child, where the snow geese seize the seamless sky   and the universe splits open for one poem— the way a life lived calls on us to praise it.

Flirtation, Rita Dove

Flirtation

BY RITA DOVE

After all, there's no need

to say anything

at first. An orange, peeled

and quartered, flares

like a tulip on a wedgewood plate

Anything can happen.

Outside the sun

has rolled up her rugs

and night strewn salt

across the sky. My heart

is humming a tune

I haven't heard in years!

Quiet's cool flesh—

let's sniff and eat it.

There are ways

to make of the moment

a topiary

so the pleasure's in

walking through.

I Am Going To Start Living Like A Mystic, Edward Hirsch

I Am Going To Start Living Like A Mystic

 

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater

and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

 

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,

each a station in a pilgrimage -- silent, pondering.

 

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies

are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

 

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text

and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

 

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel

and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

 

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs

as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

 

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,

a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

 

~ Edward Hirsch ~

 

(Lay Back the Darkness)

The Love of an Orange, Dahlia Ravikovitch

The Love of an Orange

BY DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH

An orange did love   

The man who ate it.   

A feast for the eyes   

Is a fine repast;   

Its heart held fast   

His greedy gaze.   

A citron did scold:   

I am wiser than thou.   

A cedar condoled:   

Indeed thou shalt die!   

And who can revive   

A withered bough?   

The citron did urge:   

O fool, be wise.   

The cedar did rage:   

Slander and sin!   

Repent of thy ways   

For a fool I despise.   

An orange did love   

With life and limb   

The man who ate it,   

The man who flayed it.   

An orange did love   

The man who ate it,   

To its flayer it brought   

Flesh for the teeth.   

An orange, consumed   

By the man who ate it,   

Invaded his skin   

To the flesh beneath.

Source: Poetry (April 2009).

A Noiseless Patient Dpider, Walt Whitman

A Noiseless Patient Spider   Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to                      connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Homework, Allen Ginsberg

 Homework

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran

I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,

I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,   

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,   

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,

Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,

Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie   

Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,

Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,

& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.

Boulder, April 26, 1980

The Body, Marianne Boruch

 The Body

BY MARIANNE BORUCH

has its little hobbies. The lung

likes its air best after supper,

goes deeper there to trade up

for oxygen, give everything else

away. (And before supper, yes,

during too, but there's

something about evening, that

slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,

still coming, still going ... ) As for

bones—femur, spine,

the tribe of them in there—they harden

with use. The body would like

a small mile or two. Thank you.

It would like it on a bike

or a run. Or in the water. Blue.

And food. A habit that involves

a larger circumference where a garden's

involved, beer is brewed, cows

wake the farmer with their fullness,

a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat

understands I will be crushed

into flour and starry-dust

the whole room, the baker

sweating, opening a window

to acknowledge such remarkable

confetti. And the brain,

locked in its strange

dual citizenship, idles there in the body,

neatly terraced and landscaped.

Or left to ruin, such a brain,

wild roses growing

next to the sea. The body is

gracious about that. Oh, their

scent sometimes. Their

tangle. In truth, in secret,

the first thing

in morning the eye longs to see.

What Should We Do About That Moon?, Hafiz (transl. Daniel Ladinsky)

WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THAT MOON?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon and
broke open in a field.

That night one hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered
   
and did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby
and began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.

Then the "night candle" rose into the sky
and one drunk creature, laying down his instrument,
said to his friend ~ for no apparent
Reason,

"What should we do about that moon?"

Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music

Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.

 

~ Hafiz ~

 (The Gift -- versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

Love (III), George Herbert

Love (III)

BY GEORGE HERBERT

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back

                              Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

                             From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

                             If I lacked any thing.

 

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

                             Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

                             I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

                             Who made the eyes but I?

 

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

                             Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

                             My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

Source: George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets  (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978)