Hagar In The Wikderness, Tychimba Jess

Hagar in the Wilderness

by Tyehimba Jess 

 

 

Carved Marble. Edmonia Lewis, 1875

My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
to wander the desert
in search of deliverance
the way a mother hunts
for her wayward child.
God of each eye fixed to heaven,
God of the fallen water jug,
of all the hope a vessel holds
before spilling to barren sand.
God of flesh hewn from earth
and hammered beneath a will
immaculate with the power
to bear life from the lifeless
like a well in a wasteland.
I'm made in the image of a God
that knows flight but stays me
rock still to tell a story ancient as
slavery, old as the first time
hands clasped together for mercy
and parted to find only their own
salty blessing of sweat.
I have been touched by my God
in my creation, I've known her caress
of anointing callus across my face. 
I know the lyric of her pulse
across these lips...  and yes,
I've kissed the fingertips
of my dark and mortal God.
She has shown me the truth
behind each chiseled blow
that's carved me into this life,
the weight any woman might bear 
to stretch her mouth toward her
one true God, her own
beaten, marble song.


Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907) was an African/Native American expatriate sculptor who was phenomenally successful in Rome.

W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden "For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio"

(The Second Wise Man)

My faith that in time's constant

Flow lay real assurance

Broke down on this analysis -

At any given instant

All solids dissolve, no wheels revolve,

And facts have no endurance -

And who knows if it is by design or pure inadvertence 

That the Present destroys it's inherited self-importance?

With envy, terror, rage, regret,

We anticipate or remember but never are.

To discover how to be living now

Is the reason I follow this star.

Meaning, Carl Dennis

Meaning

by Carl Dennis

 

 

If a life needn't be useful to be meaningful, 

Then maybe a life of sunbathing on a beach 

Can be thought of as meaningful for at least a few, 

The few, say, who view the sun as a god 

And consider basking a form of worship. 

 

As for those devoted to partnership with a surfboard 

Or a pair of ice skates or a bag of golf clubs, 

Though I can't argue their lives are useful, 

I'd be reluctant to claim they have no meaning 

Even if no one observes their display of mastery. 

 

No one is listening to the librarian 

I can call to mind as she practices, after work, 

In her flat on Hoover Street, the viola da gamba 

In the one hour of day that for her is golden. 

So what if she'll never be good enough 

To give a concert people will pay to hear? 

 

When I need to think of her with an audience, 

I can imagine the ghosts of composers dead for centuries,

Pleased to hear her doing her best with their music. 

 

And isn't it pleasing, as we walk at dusk to our cars 

Parked on Hoover Street, after a meeting 

On saving a shuttered hotel from the wrecking ball, 

To catch the sound of someone filling a room 

We won't be visiting with a haunting solo? 

 

And then the gifts we receive by imagining 

How down at the beach today surfers made sure 

The big waves we weren't there to appreciate 

Didn't go begging for attention. 

And think of the sunlight we failed to welcome, 

How others stepped forward to take it in.

Guerillas of Grace, Ted Loder

Gentle me, Holy One, into an unclenched moment,
a deep breath,
a letting go of heavy expectancies,
of shriveling anxieties,
of dead certainties,
that, softened by the silence,
surrounded by the light,
and opened to the mystery,
I may be found by wholeness,
upheld by the unfathomable,
entranced by the simple,
and filled with joy
that is you.
--Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace

There is Something

Ted Loder

.

Holy One,

there is something I wanted to tell you,
but there have been errands to run,
bills to pay,
arrangements to make,
meetings to attend,
friends to entertain,
washing to do...
and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you,
and mostly I forget what I'm about
or why.
O God,
don't forget me, please,
for the sake of Jesus Christ....

O Father in Heaven,
perhaps you've already heard what I wanted to tell you,
What I wanted to ask is,
forgive me,
heal me,
increase my courage, please.
Renew in me a little of love and faith,
and a sense of confidence,
and a vision of what it might mean
to live as though you were real,
and I mattered,
and everyone was sister and brother.

What I wanted to ask in my blundering way is
don't give up on me, don't become too sad about me,
but laugh with me,
and try again with me,
and I will with you, too.

from Guerrillas of Grace

Be Melting a Snow, Rumi

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks
Be Melting Snow

Totally conscious, and apropos of nothing, you come to see me.
Is someone here? I ask.
The moon. The full moon is inside your house.
My friends and I go running out into the street.
I'm in here, comes a voice from the house, but we aren't listening.
We're looking up at the sky.
My pet nightingale sobs like a drunk in the garden.
Ringdoves scatter with small cries, Where, Where.
It's midnight. The whole neighborhood is up and out
in the street thinking, The cat burglar has come back.
The actual thief is there too, saying out loud,
Yes, the cat burglar is somewhere in this crowd.
No one pays attention.
Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There's no need to go outside.
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.

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)

 

The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry

The Wild Geese

 

Horseback on Sunday morning,

harvest over, we taste persimmon

and wild grape, sharp sweet

of summer's end.  In time's maze

over the fall fields, we name names

that went west from here, names

that rest on graves.  We open

a persimmon seed to find the tree

that stands in promise,

pale, in the seed's marrow.

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes.  Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear,

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here.  And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye

clear.  What we need is here.

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

 

(Collected Poems 1957-1982)

Identity, A.R. Ammons

Identity By A. R. Ammons (1926 - 2001) 1) An individual spider web identifies a species: an order of instinct prevails           through all accidents of circumstance,                     though possibility is high along the peripheries of spider                                         webs:                                         you can go all                               around the fringing attachments                               and find disorder ripe, entropy rich, high levels of random,                     numerous occasions of accident: 2) the possible settings of a web are infinite:                     how does the spider keep                               identity                     while creating the web                     in a particular place?                     how and to what extent                               and by what modes of chemistry                               and control? it is wonderful                     how things work: I will tell you                                         about it                                         because it is interesting and because whatever is moves in weeds                     and stars and spider webs and known                                         is loved:                               in that love,                               each of us knowing it,                               I love you, for it moves within and beyond us,                               sizzles in to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees by summer windowsills:                               I will show you the underlying that takes no image to itself,                     cannot be shown or said, but weaves in and out of moons and bladderweeds,                               is all and                     beyond destruction                     because created fully in no particular form:                                         if the web were perfectly pre-set,                                         the spider could                               never find                               a perfect place to set it in: and                               if the web were perfectly adaptable, if freedom and possibility were without limit,                                         the web would lose its special identity:           the row-strung garden web keeps order at the center where space is freest (intersecting that the freest                               "medium" should                               accept the firmest order) and that order                                         diminishes toward the periphery                     allowing at the points of contact                               entropy equal to entropy.

For Presence, John O'Donohue

For Presence By John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008) Awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses. Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon. Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path. Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity. May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame. May anxiety never linger about you. May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul. May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder

Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez
Quoted in:  F. Lynn Bachleda "Blue Mountain:  A Spiritual Anthology Celebrating The Earth" (2000)

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of the conscious mind: how to live a more compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself.....There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

John Caputo

John Caputo
The Weakness of God: A Theology Of The Event (2006, p122)

God calls us before we call upon God, calling up what is best and highest in us.  In that sense God pursues us, preys upon us, or even prays to us, inasmuch as God calls upon, provokes, and invokes us.  The name of God is the name of what we desire, of everything that we desire, but it is also the name is what desires us, of what desires everything of us.....We are called by God, which is our vocation, even as we call upon God, which is our invocation.  We subsist in the space between these calls.

Miracle Fair - ~ Wislawa Szymborska

 

MIRACLE FAIR

The commonplace miracle: 

that so many common miracles take place.

 

The usual miracles: 

invisible dogs barking 

in the dead of night.

 

One of many miracles: 

a small and airy cloud 

is able to upstage the massive moon.

 

Several miracles in one: 

an alder is reflected in the water 

and is reversed from left to right 

and grows from crown to root 

and never hits bottom 

though the water isn't deep.

 

A run-of-the-mill miracle: 

winds mild to moderate 

turning gusty in storms.

 

A miracle in the first place: 

cows will be cows.

 

Next but not least: 

just this cherry orchard 

from just this cherry pit.

 

A miracle minus top hat and tails: 

fluttering white doves.

 

A miracle (what else can you call it): 

the sun rose today at three fourteen a.m. 

and will set tonight at one past eight.

 

A miracle that's lost on us: 

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers 

but still it's got more than four.

 

A miracle, just take a look around: 

the inescapable earth.

 

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary: 

the unthinkable 

can be thought. 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

 

 

(View With a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

 

 

(View With a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Monet Refuses the Operation - Lisa Mueller

Monet Refuses the Operation

Lisa Mueller

 

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

 

~ Lisel Mueller ~

 

(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

"Remember" by Christine Valters Paintner

Remember 
by Christine Valters Paintner

And what did you do on earth?
I descended daily into the hush – if only for a moment,
but sometimes for blessed hours at a time.
I followed the shimmering threads which lured me
into the night, full of wonder at all that was unfolding.
I opened myself wide to gratitude,
to the delight that there was anything at all,
much less pink-petaled peonies
and generous handfuls of red berries,
the incredible sweetness of things,
or the way dawn and dusk could reveal
my own new thresholds,
how a walk by the sea can change
everything,
and that I could be so well loved, and love in return,
that I could dance on earth’s forest floor
and say “yes” to life from the belly of sorrow.

And what was the best of it?
I was saved by beauty again and again,
the golden glimmer of sunlight
across wet pavement revealing a luminous world,
and the stone ruins of churches and monasteries,
with their arches of ancient longing holding
ten thousand prayers, ten thousand paths to hope.

And what would you have changed?
Only perhaps to have worried less about what might come,
which never did
in exactly the way I imagined.
And to spend less time in front of screens,
offering more of myself to the elements of wind and rain and mud,
to roll with playful abandon in the wet grass, the way dogs do.

And what will you do now?
I will reach across the veil and whisper the word
“remember” to anyone who will listen.

"Remember" by Christine Valters Paintner 

Then Shall I Leap Into Love, Mechthild of Magdeburg

Then shall I leap into love
By Mechthild of Magdeburg
(1207 - 1297)
English version by Frank J. Tobin

I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me.

If you want me to leap with abandon,

You must intone the song.

Then I shall leap into love,

From love into knowledge,

From knowledge into enjoyment,

And from enjoyment beyond all human sensations.

There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still

Primary Wonder (Denise Levertov)

Primary Wonder

 

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

Problems insoluble and problems offering

their own ignored solutions

jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber

along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing

their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then

once more the quiet mystery

is present to me, the throng's clamor

recedes: the mystery

that there is anything, anything at all,

let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,

rather than void: and that, O Lord,

Creator, Hallowed One, You still,

hour by hour sustain it.

 

~ Denise Levertov ~

 

(Selected Poems)

Singapore (Mary Oliver)

Singapore

 

In Singapore, in the airport,

A darkness was ripped from my eyes.

In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.

A woman knelt there, washing something

in the white bowl.

 

Disgust argued in my stomach

and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

 

A poem should always have birds in it.

Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.

Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.

A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain

rising and falling.

A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

 

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.

Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and

neither could win.

She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?

Everybody needs a job.

 

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,

which is dull enough.

She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as

hubcaps, with a blue rag.

Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.

She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river.

Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

 

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.

And I want to rise up from the crust and the slop

and fly down to the river.

This probably won’t happen.

But maybe it will.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

 

Of course, it isn’t.

Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only

the light that can shine out of a life.  I mean

the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,

The way her smile was only for my sake; I mean

the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(House of Light)

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass (Mary Oliver)

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

(for National Poetry Month)

                                1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat

     of the sweet grass? 

Will the owl bite off its own wings? 

Will the lark forget to lift its body into the air or

    forget to sing? 

Will the rivers run upstream?

                              ~

Behold, I say--behold 

the reliability and the finery and the teachings

   of this gritty earth gift.

                               ~

                               2. 

Eat bread and understand comfort. 

Drink water and understand delight. 

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds 

who are drinking the sweetness, who are 

    thrillingly gluttonous.

                               ~

For one thing leads to another. 

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot. 

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

                                            ~

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star 

both intimate and ultimate, 

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

                                       ~

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper: 

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

                                ~

                                3. 

The witchery of living 

is my whole conversation 

with you, my darlings. 

All I can tell you is what I know.

                               ~

Look, and look again. 

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. 

                              ~

It's more than bones. 

It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. 

It's more than the beating of a single heart. 

It's praising. 

It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. 

You have a life--just imagine that! 

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe

  still another.

                               ~

                               4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus, 

the dancer, the potter, 

to make me a begging bowl 

which I believe 

my soul needs.

                      ~

And if I come to you, 

to the door of your comfortable house 

with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails, 

will you put something into it?

                          ~

I would like to take this chance. 

I would like to give you this chance.

                               ~

                               5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we

  change. 

Congratulations, if

  you have changed.

                               ~

                               6.

Let me ask you this. 

Do you also think that beauty exists for some

  fabulous reason?

                               ~

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure--

  your life-- 

what would do for you?

                               ~

                               7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself. 

Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to. 

That was many years ago. 

Since then I have gone out from my confinements,

  though with difficulty. 

                               ~ 

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart. 

I cast them out; I put them on the mush pile. 

They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment

  somehow or another).

                                ~~

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope. 

I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is. 

I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned, 

I have become younger.

                                      ~

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? 

Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

                                            ~

by Mary Oliver