Postcards, E. Ethelbert Miller

Postcards by E. Ethelbert Miller When was the last time you mailed a postcard?    My mother kept the ones I sent her. My sister mailed them  back    to me after my mother died. I had forgotten I had written    so many small notes to my mother. The price of stamps    kept changing. I was always mentioning on the back of cards    I was having a good time. I can remember the first time    I lied to my mother. It was something small maybe the size    of a postcard. I went somewhere I was not supposed to go.    I told my mother I was at the library but I was with Judy    that afternoon. Her small hand inside my hand.    I was beginning to feel something I knew I would never write    home about.

About This Poem  "My mother died on November 28, 2010. Months later my sister sent me things my mother had saved over the years. Old letters and postcards sent from various places I visited. I think my mother enjoyed collecting stamps. I like this poem because there is reference to Judy, a young Chinese girl I was in love with back in the early sixties. Judy's race or color is not mentioned in the poem. It was a small secret. Everything seems small when one looks back at the past. Is an entire life no larger than a postcard or stamp?" --E. Ethelbert Miller

Any Morning, William Stafford

Any Morning

 

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

 

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

 

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People wont even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

 

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

 

~ William Stafford ~

 

 

(The Way It Is)

Ceres Looks at the Morning, Eavan Boland

 

Ceres Looks at the Morning
(excerpt)

 

I wake slowly. Already
my body is a twilight: Solid. Gold.
At the edge of a larger darkness. But outside
my window
a summer day is beginning. Apple trees
appear, one by one. Light is pouring
into the promise of fruit.

 

Beautiful morning
look at me as a daughter would
look: with that love and that curiosity:
as to what she came from.
And what she will become.

 

~ Eavan Boland ~

 

(The Lost Land)

The Layers, Stanley Kunitz

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 the 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.

 

~ Stanley Kunitz ~

 

(Passing Through)

Throw Yourself Like Seed, Miguel De Unamuno

Throw Yourself Like Seed

 

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

 

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

 

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

 

~ Miguel De Unamuno ~

 

(Roots and Wings, edited and translated by Robert Bly)

Welcome Morning, Anne Sexton

Welcome Morning

 

There is joy 

in all: 

in the hair I brush each morning, 

in the Cannon towel, newly washed, 

that I rub my body with each morning, 

in the chapel of eggs I cook 

each morning, 

in the outcry from the kettle 

that heats my coffee 

each morning, 

in the spoon and the chair 

that cry "hello there, Anne" 

each morning, 

in the godhead of the table 

that I set my silver, plate, cup upon 

each morning.

 

All this is God, 

right here in my pea-green house 

each morning 

and I mean, 

though often forget, 

to give thanks, 

to faint down by the kitchen table 

in a prayer of rejoicing 

as the holy birds at the kitchen window 

peck into their marriage of seeds.

 

So while I think of it, 

let me paint a thank-you on my palm 

for this God, this laughter of the morning, 

lest it go unspoken.

 

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, 

dies young.

 

~ Anne Sexton ~

 

 

(The Awful Rowing Toward God)

The Way In, Linda Hogan

 

The Way In

 

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.

Sometimes the way in is a song.

But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,

and beauty.

To enter stone, be water.

To rise through hard earth, be plant

desiring sunlight, believing in water.

To enter fire, be dry.

To enter life, be food.

 

~ Linda Hogan ~

 

(Rounding the Human Corners)

 

 

Testimony, Rebecca Baggett

Testimony

 

(for my daughters)

  

I want to tell you that the world 

is still beautiful. 

I tell you that despite 

children raped on city streets,  

shot down in school rooms, 

despite the slow poisons seeping 

from old and hidden sins 

into our air, soil, water, 

despite the thinning film 

that encloses our aching world.  

Despite my own terror and despair. 

  

I want you to know that spring 

is no small thing, that 

the tender grasses curling 

like a baby's fine hairs around  

your fingers are a recurring 

miracle. I want to tell you 

that the river rocks shine 

like God, that the crisp  

voices of the orange and gold 

October leaves are laughing at death, 

  

I want to remind you to look 

beneath the grass, to note 

the fragile hieroglyphs 

of ant, snail, beetle. I want 

you to understand that you 

are no more and no less necessary 

than the brown recluse, the ruby- 

throated hummingbird, the humpback  

whale, the profligate mimosa. 

I want to say, like Neruda, 

that I am waiting for 

"a great and common tenderness", 

that I still believe 

we are capable of attention, 

that anyone who notices the world 

must want to save it.

 

~ Rebecca Baggett ~

 

(Women's Uncommon Prayers)

The Machine - Rilke

The Machine endangers all we have made.

We allow it to rule instead of obey.

To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:

the carver's hand takes too long to feel its way.

 

The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape

and its factories subside into silence.

It thinks it's alive and does everything better.

With equal resolve it creates and destroys.

 

But life holds mystery for us yet.  In a hundred places

we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers

that - when you feel it - brings you to your knees.

 

There are yet words that come near the unsayable,

and, from crumbling stones, a new music

to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

(In Praise of Mortality, trans. A. Barrows and J. Macy)

 

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches - Mary Oliver

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?
   
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
   
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!
   
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
   
   
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
   
   
Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.
   
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
   
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
   
   
To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
   
To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
   
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night
   
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
   
    
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
   
While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
   
   
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
   
I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
   
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
    
   
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
   

   
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
   
And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
   
That was then, which hasn't ended yet.
   
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.
   
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)

The Real Work , Wendell Berry

The Real Work

 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

 

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

 

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

 

(Collected Poems)