Have You Prayed? Li-Young Lee

Have You Prayed?

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

When the wind

turns and asks, in my father's voice,

Have you prayed?

I know three things. One:

I'm never finished answering to the dead.

Two: A man is four winds and three fires.

And the four winds are his father's voice,

his mother's voice . . .

Or maybe he's seven winds and ten fires.

And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,

dreaming, thinking . . .

Or is he the breath of God?

When the wind turns traveler

and asks, in my father's voice, Have you prayed?

I remember three things.

One: A father's love

is milk and sugar,

two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what's left over

is trimmed and leavened to make the bread

the dead and the living share.

And patience? That's to endure

the terrible leavening and kneading.

And wisdom? That's my father's face in sleep.

When the wind

asks, Have you prayed?

I know it's only me

reminding myself

a flower is one station between

earth's wish and earth's rapture, and blood

was fire, salt, and breath long before

it quickened any wand or branch, any limb

that woke speaking. It's just me

in the gowns of the wind,

or my father through me, asking,

Have you found your refuge yet?

asking, Are you happy?

Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.

The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

"Have you Prayed?," from Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee

The Props Assist The House, Emily Duckinson

The Props assist the House
by Emily Dickinson


The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter-
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life-
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness-then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

Caedmon, Denise Levertov

 Caedmon

BY DENISE LEVERTOV

All others talked as if

talk were a dance.

Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet

would break the gliding ring.

Early I learned to

hunch myself

close by the door:

then when the talk began

I'd wipe my

mouth and wend

unnoticed back to the barn

to be with the warm beasts,

dumb among body sounds

of the simple ones.

I'd see by a twist

of lit rush the motes

of gold moving

from shadow to shadow

slow in the wake

of deep untroubled sighs.

The cows

munched or stirred or were still. I

was at home and lonely,

both in good measure. Until

the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing

my feeble beam,

a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:   

but the cows as before

were calm, and nothing was burning,

             nothing but I, as that hand of fire   

touched my lips and scorched my tongue   

and pulled my voice

                            into the ring of the dance.

Denise Levertov, "Caedmon" from Breathing the Water. 

The Summer Palace, Michael Lue ig

The Summer Palace

Michael Luenig

Make a little garden in your pocket,

Fill your cuffs with radishes and rocket,

Let a passionfruit crawl up your thigh,

Grow some oregano in your fly.

Make a steamy compost of your fears,

Trickle irrigate your life with tears,

Let your troubled mind become a trellis,

Turn your heart into a summer palace.

Getting Close, Victoria Redel

Getting Close

by Victoria Redel

 

Because my mother loved pocketbooks
I come alive at the opening click or close of a metal clasp.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, a faux crocodile handle makes me
   weep.

Breathy clearing of throat, a smooth arm, heels on pavement, she
   lingers, sound tattoos.

I go to the thrift store to feel for bobby pins caught in the pocket
   seam
of a camel hair coat.

I hinge a satin handbag in the crease of my arm. I buy a little
   change purse with its curled and fitted snap.

My mother bought this for me. This was my mother's.

I buy and then I buy and then, another day, I buy something else.

In Paris she had a dog, Bijou, and when they fled Paris in 1942
   they left the dog behind.

When my mother died on February 9, 1983, she left me.

Now, thirty years later and I am exactly her age.

I tell my husband I will probably die by the end of today and all day he says, Are you getting close, Sweetheart? And late in the afternoon, he asks if he should buy enough filet of sole for two.

From a blue velvet clutch I take out a mirror and behold my lips in
   the small rectangle.

Put on something nice. Let him splurge and take you out for
   dinner, my mother whispers on the glass.

Why Then Do We Nit Despair, Anna Akhmatova

Why Then Do We Nit Despair, Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why then do we not despair?

 

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town;

at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

 

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined, dirty houses --

something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries.

 

~ Anna Akhmatova ~

 

 

(Poems of Akhmatova, edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward)

 

Letter of Retainer, Morton Janklow

Letter of Retainer

 

for Morton Janklow

 

2.

 

The heart was made to stammer.

How I wish it weren't so.

By moonlight, even the stars

have a grammar.  Before we are 

deleted from these paragraphs of snow,

I'd hold you

 

harmless from and against all losses

 

if I could,

but Earth is unforgiving.

 

In the samovars of night,

where all love's litanies repeat,

when grounds settle

and the time is right

we brew hope

like a small fluid contract.

So, if you wish,

we'll set forth upon an understanding,

 

that far rich wild trip

so dangerous to complete

which, in the suburbs of a glance,

on any avenue, beings in risk,

where all best journeys start,

with the half-lit hieroglyphics

of the heart.

 

~ Diane Ackerman ~

 

(Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems)

Who Knows What Is Going On, Juan Ramon Jimenez

Who Knows What is Going On
By Juan Ramon Jimenez
(1881 - 1958)
English version by Robert Bly

          Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

          How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!

          How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!

          This rose was poison.

          That sword gave life.

          I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.

          I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.

Still Life With Invisible Canoe, Idra Novey

Still Life with Invisible Canoe   Idra Novey

Levinas asked if we have the right To be        the way I ask my sons If they’d like to be trees        The way the word tree Makes them a little animal Dancing up and down Like bears in movies                   Bears I have to say Pretend we are children      At a river one of them says So we sip it    pivot in the hallway    Call it a canoe It is noon in the living room We are rowing through a blue That is a feeling mostly  The way drifting greenly Under real trees  Is a feeling near holy

Us vs Them, David Tomas Martinez

Us vs Them

BY DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

My childhood was not an anxious place,

though I lay

              in my bed, awake, thumbing

my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun

              imploded

              would Russian astronauts be OK,

they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs,

              they that chased their own tail

around this water bowl

              we call Earth. When I was a child,

in elementary school

             we practiced a type of

             protection

called Duck and Cover,

where we huddled

                             under desks in case of a nuclear

attack

by the Russians. They were communists,

              had the bomb, and were evil

Reagan told us

from the small grave

                 of a TV screen.

In the sixties, Nixon said the same

              thing, and the Panthers

              countered with "the Viet Cong never

called me nigger" With their picks

like unclenched fists,

              with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb,

they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014,

and America is still scared of

                            the Russians and black people;

              now the American Dream is to be debt free,

which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least

              I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.

The Hawk, Franz Wright

The Hawk

 

Maybe in a million years

a better form of human

being will come, happier

and more intelligent.  A few already

have infiltrated this world and lived

to very much regret it,

I suppose.

Me,

I'd prefer to have come

in the form of that hawk, floating over

the mirroring fire

of Clearlake's

hill, my gold

skull filled with nothing

but God's will

the whole day through, instead

of these glinting voices incessantly

unerringly guiding me

to pursue

what makes me sick, and not to

what makes me glad.  And yet

I am changing: this three-pound lump

of sentient meat electrified

by hope and terror has learned to hear

His silence like the sun,

and sought to change!

And friends

on earth at the same time

as me, listen: from the sound of those crickets

last night, Rene Char said

prenatal life

must have been sweet -

each voice perhaps also a star

in that night

from which

this time

we won't be

interrupted anymore - but

fellow monsters while we are still here, for one minute, think

about this: there is someone right now who is looking

to you, not Him, for whatever

love still exists.

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

 

(God's Silence)

 

In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus, Alden Nowllan

In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

 

I wouldn't like to be one

of the walrus people

for the rest of my life

but I wish I could spend

one sunny afternoon

lying on the rocks with them.

I suspect it would be similar

to drinking beer in a tavern

that caters to longshoremen

and won't admit women.

We'd exchange no

cosmic secrets.  I'd merely say,

"How yuh doin' you big old walrus?"

and the nearest of

the walrus people

would answer,

"Me? I'm doin' great.

How yuh doin' yourself,

you big old human being, you?"

How good it is to share

the earth with such creatures

and how unthinkable it would have been

to have missed all this

by not being born:

a happy thought, that,

for not being born is

the only tragedy

that we can imagine

but never fear.

 

~ Alden Nowlan ~

 

Sweetness
by Stephen Dunn
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care
where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

"Sweetness" by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems

The Turtle, Mary Oliver

The Turtle

 

breaks from the blue-black

skin of the water, dragging her shell

with its mossy scutes

across the shallows and through the rushes

and over the mudflats, to the uprise,

to the yellow sand,

to dig with her ungainly feet

a nest, and hunker there spewing

her white eggs down

into the darkness, and you think

 

of her patience, her fortitude,

her determination to complete

what she was born to do----

and then you realize a greater thing----

she doesn’t consider

what she was born to do.

She’s only filled

with an old blind wish.

It isn’t even hers but came to her

in the rain or the soft wind

which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.

 

She can’t see

herself apart from the rest of the world

or the world from what she must do

every spring.

Crawling up the high hill,

luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,

she doesn’t dream

she knows

she is a part of the pond she lives in,

the tall trees are her children,

the birds that swim above her

are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(Dream Work)

Khaleesi, Leah Umansky

Khaleesi Says

BY LEAH UMANSKY

In this story, she is fire-born:

knee-deep in the shuddering world.

In this story, she knows no fear,

for what is fractured is a near-bitten star,

a false-bearing tree,

or a dishonest wind.

In this story, fear is a house gone dry.

Fear is not being a woman.

I'm no ordinary woman, she says.

My dreams come true.

And she says and she is

and I say, yes, give me that.

Source: Poetry (January 2014).

The Fire, Franz Wright

The Fire

 

Listen, I've light

in my eyes

and on my skin

the warmth of a star, so strange

is this

that I

can barely comprehend it:

I think

I'll lift my face to it, and then

I lift my face,

and don't even know how

this is done.  And

everything alive

(and everything's

alive) is turning

into something else

as at the heart

of some annihilating

or is it creating

fire

that's burning, unseeably, always

burning at such speeds

as eyes cannot

detect, just try

to observe your own face

growing old

in the mirror, or

is it beginning

to be born?

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

 

(God's Silence)

At The Lake, Mary Oliver

At the Lake

 

A fish leaps

like a black pin --

then -- when the starlight

strikes its side --

 

like a silver pin.

In an instant

the fish's spine

alters the fierce line of rising

 

and it curls a little --

the head, like scalloped tin,

plunges back,

and it's gone.

 

This is, I think,

what holiness is:

the natural world,

where every moment is full

 

of the passion to keep moving.

Inside every mind

there's a hermit's cave

full of light,

 

full of snow,

full of concentration.

I've knelt there,

and so have you,

 

hanging on

to what you love,

to what is lovely.

The lake's

 

shining sheets

don't make a ripple now,

and the stars

are going off to their blue sleep,

 

but the words are in place --

and the fish leaps, and leaps again

from the black plush of the poem,

that breathless space.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(White Pine)

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 seriousnes.

 

 Give me your hand.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

(Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Prayer, Philip Metres

Prayer   Philip Metres

Wither me to within me: Welt me to weal me common again: Withdraw to wear me weary: Over me to hover and lover again: Before me to form and perform me: Round me to rill me liquid incisions: Behind me to hunt and haunt me: Down me to drown indecision: Bury me to seed me: bloom me In loam me: grind me to meal me Knead me to rise: raise me to your mouth Rive me to river me: End me to unmend me: Rend me to render me:       About This Poem   “During a struggle of chronic pain years ago, I began searching restlessly for prayers that might reach past my own resistance to prayers I’d inherited in my own faith tradition, and to write my own—often through the rhetoric or language of other prayers. This poem is born from an old prayer by Lancelot Andrewes, and plays with the paradox embedded in prayers of petition—that we are trying to reach outside of ourselves, but for something of ourselves.” —Philip Metres

The Best People, Ernest Hemingway

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

― Ernest Hemingway

I Think Continually Of Those, Stephen Spender

I Think Continually of Those

 

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history

Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious is never to forget

The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;

Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,

Nor its grave evening demand for love;

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,

And by the streamers of white cloud,

And whispers of wind in the listening sky;

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

 

 

~ Stephen Spender ~

 

(Collected Poems)

 

 

A Word For Joy, Franz Wright

A Word For Joy

 

I am happy among children's eyes

I am very worried and happy

among the crazy and the hopeless

they recognize me, right away

I'm home

And there is nowhere I would rather be

alive or dead

than in this world

Inside this skull I hold and ponder

unending space expanding if I understand correctly

at an accelerating rate, meanwhile

housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless

deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,

I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every

mind, behind each face I pass

and as I've been instructed each morning

on rising I obliterate the print of my body

and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore

the wind)

and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid

I don't mind saying that I am scared

to death of God: I am

afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and

I'll take it!

I have been happy here

among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here

and exactly what it was they were expected

to take a good close look at,

I can't grasp it, but I am so very glad.

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

(God's Silence)

 

Life Whike You Wait,

Life While-You-Wait

 

Life While-You-Wait.

Performance without rehearsal.

Body without alterations.

Head without premeditation.

 

I know nothing of the role I play.

I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.

 

I have to guess on the spot

just what this play's all about.

 

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.

I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.

I trip at every step over my own ignorance.

I can't conceal my hayseed manners.

My instincts are for happy histrionics.

Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.

Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

 

Words and impulses you can't take back,

stars you'll never get counted,

your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?

the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

 

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,

or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!

But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.

Is it fair, I ask

(my voice a little hoarse,

since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

 

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz

taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.

I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.

The props are surprisingly precise.

The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.

The farthest galaxies have been turned on.

Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.

And whatever I do

will become forever what I've done.

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

 

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997,

trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

Love Should Grow Up Like A Wild Iris In The Fields, Susan Griffin

Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields

 

Love should grow up like a wild iris in the fields,

unexpected, after a terrible storm, opening a purple

mouth to the rain, with not a thought to the future,

ignorant of the grass and the graveyard of leaves

around, forgetting its own beginning.

Love should grow like a wild iris

but does not.

Love more often is to be found in kitchens at the dinner hour,

tired out and hungry, lingers over tables in houses where

the walls record movements, while the cook is probably angry,

and the ingredients of the meal are budgeted, while

a child cries feed me now and her mother not quite

hysterical says over and over, wait just a bit, just a bit,

love should grow up in the fields like a wild iris

but never does

really startle anyone, was to be expected, was to be

predicted, is almost absurd, goes on from day to day, not quite

blindly, gets taken to the cleaners every fall, sings old

songs over and over, and falls on the same piece of rug that

never gets tacked down, gives up, wants to hide, is not

brave, knows too much, is not like an

iris growing wild but more like

staring into space

in the street

not quite sure

which door it was, annoyed about the sidewalk being

slippery, trying all the doors, thinking

if love wished the world to be well, it would be well.

Love should

grow up like a wild iris, but doesn't, it comes from

the midst of everything else, sees like the iris

of an eye, when the light is right,

feels in blindness and when there is nothing else is

tender, blinks, and opens

face up to the skies.

 

~ Susan Griffin ~

 

(Like the Iris of an Eye)

 

Mothers and Daughters, Jo McDougall

Mothers and Daughters
by Jo McDougall


When I was a child
my mother and I traveled the long miles
to see her mother, once a year.
That hillside farm was mostly gravel,
the kitchen smelled like a churn,
guineas and chickens strutted the porch.
When we left,
my grandmother would stand
in her garden and wave.
I’d watch her a long time,
leaning out the window of the car.
My mother would say little on the way home,
her eyes now and then filling with tears.
Perhaps she was thinking of that garden,
the one she tried to replicate year after year,
every last pole bean and zinnia,
the one she left to me.

"Mothers and Daughters" by Jo McDougall from In the Home of the Famous Dead.