The Cat, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Cat by Lawrence Ferlinghetti                  The cat                               licks its paw and         lies down in                             the bookshelf nook                                                                  She                                     can lie in a                                               sphinx position         without moving for so                                          many hours and then turn her head                                 to me and                                           rise and stretch        and turn                        her back to me and               lick her paw again as if                                     no real time had passed                      It hasn't                                     and she is the sphinx with                         all the time in the world                                              in the desert of her time              The cat                     knows where flies die                                sees ghosts in motes of air                                                    and shadows in sunbeams She hears                   the music of the spheres and        the hum in the wires of houses                            and the hum of the universe              in interstellar spaces                                                       but                 prefers domestic places                              and the hum of the heater "The Cat" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from These Are My Rivers.

Enough, Katie Peterson

 Enough

BY KATIE PETERSON

So many forget-me-nots, with their white centers,

scattered, you'd say, if there weren't

so many everywhere, as many as the stars

last night in between the branches

above the porch, behind the house.

Was it an argument or were there just

things they had to say?

I could have faith in so many creatures—

the old setter from the neighbor yard

who follows me around the corner

and no longer, the chick with its new beak

just past breakable whose lighter top feathers

have a bit of flight, any mother bear—

you say things and the next day

it's like they don't matter, we want our faces

to alter though we don't want to get older, neither

do we want to get younger, repetition

with less knowledge is ridiculous,

just ask the Greeks, you get to keep

being a tree but without the branch

that showed the sky your starlike shape?

I don't think so. Steadiness can be useful,

but my loyalty loves a form

that will follow me through changes.

At a diagonal the dark woods

on the back slope have enough space

to walk between, not enough to hide.

He looks into them

and writes notes to his mother, she

looks into them and finds alignment,

or looks for what she wants.

She has a human skeleton on her desk.

He has a protractor. I had wishes

for both of them yesterday

but the weather has become so kindly,

so temperate, I forget what blessings

they don't think they have.

Katie Peterson, "Enough" from The Accounts

Sunrise, Mary Oliver

Sunrise

 

You can

die for it --

an idea,

or the world. People

 

have done so,

brilliantly,

letting

their small bodies be bound

 

to the stake,

creating

an unforgettable

fury of light. But

 

this morning,

climbing the familiar hills

in the familiar

fabric of dawn, I thought

 

of China,

and India

and Europe, and I thought

how the sun

 

blazes

for everyone just

so joyfully

as it rises

 

under the lashes

of my own eyes, and I thought

I am so many!

What is my name?

 

What is the name

of the deep breath I would take

over and over

for all of us? Call it

 

whatever you want, it is

happiness, it is another one

of the ways to enter

fire.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(New and Selected Poems, Volume I)

With Mercy For The Greedy, Anne Sexton

With Mercy for the Greedy

BY ANNE SEXTON

Concerning your letter in which you ask   

me to call a priest and in which you ask   

me to wear The Cross that you enclose;   

your own cross,

your dog-bitten cross,

no larger than a thumb,

small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—

I pray to its shadow,

that gray place

where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep.

I detest my sins and I try to believe

in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,   

its solid neck, its brown sleep.

True. There is

a beautiful Jesus.

He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.

How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!

How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!   

But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

All morning long   

I have worn

your cross, hung with package string around my throat.   

It tapped me lightly as a child's heart might,

tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.   

Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.

My friend, my friend, I was born   

doing reference work in sin, and born   

confessing it. This is what poems are:   

with mercy

for the greedy,

they are the tongue's wrangle,

the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Anne Sexton, "With Mercy for the Greedy" from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). 

From Fairies, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

from Fairies

by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

2

Fairies begin their day by coming together a moment and sharing joy.

They love the feeling, which dew on the leaves draws from grass, lilacs and the response of meadow and flowers to the dawn.

Diminutive green sylphs now run in the grass, whose growth seems intimately associated with theirs, a single line of concentration.        

They talk to themselves, constantly repeating, with an intensity causing their etheric doubles, grass, to vibrate as they pass, vivifying growth.

To rabbits and young children they're visible, but I see points of light, tiny clouds of color and gleams of movement.

The lawn is covered with these flashes.

In low alyssums along a border, one exquisite, tiny being plays around stems, passing in and out of each bud.

She's happy and feels much affection for the plants, which she regards as her own body. 

The material of her actual body is loosely knit as steam or a colored gas, bright apple-green or yellow, and is very close to emotion.

Tenderness for plants shows as rose; sympathy for their growth and adaptability as flashes of emerald.

When she feels joy, her body responds all-over with a desire to be somewhere or do something for plants.

Hers is not a world of surfaces--skin, husks, bark with definite edges and identities.

Trees appear as columns of light melting into surroundings where form is discerned, but is glowing, transparent, mingling like breath.

She tends to a plant by maintaining fusion between the plant's form and life-vitality contained within.

She works as part of nature's massed intelligence to express the involution of awareness or consciousness into a form.

And she includes vitality, because one element of form is action.

Sprouting, branching, leafing, blossoming, crumbling to humus are all form to a fairy.
 

Copyright © 2013 by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

Just Now, W.D. Merwin

Just Now
By W. S. Merwin
(1927 - )

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever
believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

On Pilgrimage, Czeslaw Milosz

On Pilgrimage

 

May the smell of thyme and lavender accompany us on our journey

To a province that does not know how lucky it is

For it was, among all the hidden corners of the earth,

The only one chosen and visited.

 

We tended toward the Place but no signs led there.

Till it revealed itself in a pastoral valley

Between mountains that look older than memory,

By a narrow river humming at the grotto.

 

May the taste of wine and roast meat stay with us

As it did when we used to feast in the clearings,

Searching, not finding, gathering rumors,

Always comforted by the brightness of the day.

 

May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks

Remind us of everything we have lost,

For we have seen on our way and fallen in love

With the world that will pass in a twinkling.

 

~ Czeslaw Milosz ~

 

 

(New & Collected Poems, translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass)

I find You, Lord. Rainer Maria Rilke

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all By Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) English version by Stephen Mitchell I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. The wondrous game that power plays with Things is to move in such submission through the world: groping in roots and growing thick in trunks and in treetops like a rising from the dead

Love The Earth, Walt Whitman

Love the earth and sun and the animals,

 despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others,

hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,

have patience and indulgence toward the people,

take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,

or to any man or number of men,

go freely with powerful uneducated persons,

and with the young, and with the mothers or families,

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,

and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;

and your very flesh shall be a great poem....

 

 

~ Walt Whitman ~

 

 (from the Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition)

God Pours Light, Hafiz

GOD POURS LIGHT

 

God

pours light

into every cup,

quenching darkness.

 

The proudly pious

stuff their cups with parchment

and critique the taste of ink

 

while God pours light

 

and the trees lift their limbs

without worry of redemption,

every blossom a chalice.

 

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls

with words that wet their parched lips

 

as light

pours like rain

into every empty cup

set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.

 

~ Hafiz ~

 

(Interpretive version of Ghazal 11 by Jose Orez)

My Light With Yours, Edgar Lee Masters

My Light with Yours   Edgar Lee Masters

I When the sea has devoured the ships, And the spires and the towers Have gone back to the hills. And all the cities Are one with the plains again. And the beauty of bronze, And the strength of steel Are blown over silent continents, As the desert sand is blown— My dust with yours forever. II When folly and wisdom are no more, And fire is no more, Because man is no more; When the dead world slowly spinning Drifts and falls through the void— My light with yours In the Light of Lights forever!

Five A.M. In The Punewoods, Mary Oliver

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

 

I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

 

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

 

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

 

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

 

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

 

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them — I swear it! —

 

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

 

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

 

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(House of Light) 

 

A Postcard of Christ Carrying the Cross, Patrick Donnelly

A Postcard of Christ Carrying the Cross,   Patrick Donnelly

circle of Giovanni Bellini circa 1505 oil on wood, is what he fits between his third and fourth weekly pill boxes, to remind himself to reorder. His routine about the anti- virals is of greater magnitude, maybe, than the one in which Mrs. Gardner used to place a vase of violets in front of the painting, when she owned it. This card’s only a reproduction of the Passion, not the original. But we’ve seen how imitation and daily use can make of pity and fear an almost cozy utensil. The Savior’s torso is pointed toward the royal climb, but his unreadable eye turns out, loosing on you, passerby, a tear of blood and milk.

Spring Follows Winter Ince More, Tom Henmen

Spring Follows Winter Once More
by Tom Hennen



Lying here in the tall grass
Where it’s so soft
Is this what it is to go home?
Into the earth
Of worms and black smells
With a larch tree gathering sunlight
In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough
To let out
A flock of geese.

"Spring Follows Winter Once More" by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. 

Bean achy, John O'Donohue

Beannacht

("Blessing")

 

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

 

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

 

~ John O'Donohue ~

 

(Echoes of Memory)

To bar Phadraic, David Whyte

TOBAR PHADRAIC

 

Turn sideways into the light as they say

the old ones did and disappear into the originality

of it all.  Be impatient with explanations

and discipline the mind not to begin

questions it cannot answer.  Walk the green road

above the bay and the low glinting fields

toward the evening sun.  Let that Atlantic

gleam be ahead of you and the gray light

of the bay below you,

until you catch, down on your left,

the break in the wall,

for just above in the shadow

you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm

of rock holding the water close to the mountain,

a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,

and in the niche above, notes to the dead

and supplications for those who still live.

Now you are alone with the transfiguration

and ask no healing for your own

but look down as if looking through time,

as if through a rent veil from the other

side of the question you’ve refused to ask,

 

and remember how as a child

your arms could rise and your palms

turn out to bless the world.

 

~ David Whyte ~

 

(River Flow)

Days We Would Rather Know, Michael Blumenthal

Days We Would Rather Know
by Michael Blumenthal


There are days we would rather know
than these, as there is always, later,
a wife we would rather have married
than whom we did, in that severe nowness
time pushed, imperfectly, to then. Whether,
standing in the museum before Rembrandt’s “Juno,”
we stand before beauty, or only before a consensus
about beauty, is a question that makes all beauty
suspect … and all marriages. Last night,
leaves circled the base of the ginkgo as if
the sun had shattered during the night
into a million gold coins no one had the sense
to claim. And now, there are days we would
rather know than these, days when to stand
before beauty and before “Juno” are, convincingly,
the same, days when the shattered sunlight
seeps through the trees and the women we marry
stay interesting and beautiful both at once,
and their men. And though there are days
we would rather know than now, I am,
at heart, a scared and simple man. So I tighten
my arms around the woman I love, now
and imperfectly, stand before “Juno” whispering
beautiful beautiful until I believe it, and-
when I come home at night-I run out
into the day’s pale dusk with my broom
and my dustpan, sweeping the coins from the base
of the ginkgo, something to keep for a better tomorrow:
days we would rather know that never come.

"Days We Would Rather Know" by Michael Blumenthal from Days We Would Rather Know.

Deep In The Quiet Wood, James Weldon Johnson

Deep in the Quiet Wood   James Weldon Johnson

Are you bowed down in heart? Do you but hear the clashing discords and the din of life? Then come away, come to the peaceful wood, Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now, From out the palpitating solitude Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains? They are above, around, within you, everywhere. Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come. They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones. Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale Until, responsive to the tonic chord, It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ, Filling earth for you with heavenly peace And holy harmonies

The Small Vases From Hebron, Naomi Shihab Nye

The Small Vases from Hebron

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Tip their mouths open to the sky.   

Turquoise, amber,

the deep green with fluted handle,   

pitcher the size of two thumbs,   

tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower   

which could have lived invisibly   

in loose soil beside the road,   

sprig of succulent rosemary,

bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,   

thread, fragment, breath.   

And it bends. It waits all day.

As the bread cools and the children   

open their gray copybooks   

to shape the letter that looks like   

a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal

perfectly arranged inside the larger petal

or the way tinted glass filters light.   

Men and boys, praying when they died,

fall out of their skins.

The whole alphabet of living,   

heads and tails of words,

sentences, the way they said,   

"Ya'Allah!" when astonished,   

or "ya'ani" for "I mean"—

a crushed glass under the feet

still shines.         

But the child of Hebron sleeps

with the thud of her brothers falling   

and the long sorrow of the color red.

Naomi Shihab Nye, "The Small Vases from Hebron" from Fuel

The Way It Is, William Stafford

 

The Way It Is

 

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 

~ William Stafford ~

 

(The Way It Is

A Smile, Ko Un

A Smile
By Ko Un
(1933 - )
English version by Brother Anthony of Taize

Shakyamuni held up a lotus
so Kashyapa smiled.
Not at all.
The lotus smiled
so Kashyapa smiled.

Nowhere was Shakyamuni!

Fanny Linguistics: Nickole   Nickole Brown

What people don’t know about my name is that my grandmother gave me that “k”                            —my very own unexpected consonant—                             those two strong arms and two strong legs, that broom-handle spine—                             that letter about no one with a name same as mine has. A mis-              spelling, really—                           the same botched phonetics of all her girls’ names,             misspelled but fancy as chandeliers—Latonna Lee, Candies La Rayne, Lesi Annett                —names that know never to drink               lemon water from a silver fingerbowl but names that can be bobbed with a “y”                and cheerlead. Now, she called me Koey, so don’t expect me to respond to the first nasal tone of my name               but the harsher            cough  that follows, that typo tambourined from the back of the throat. I’ll answer to cold & coal & coke,                           sometimes               even hear that sound as a scoop of coco, something dry from the tin, but warmed with a little sugar and milk, a name snowing               while it’s safe inside.   About This Poem   “This piece is from my Fanny Linguistics series, a group of poems that explore the particular way my grandmother used (or mis-used, depending on who’s talking) language. You see, she was raised during a time when women weren’t necessarily taught how to read and write, so coupled with the specific way of speaking given to her in Western Kentucky, she had to make do. Now, my mother gave birth to me young (she was only sixteen), so it was up to my grandmother to fill out my birth certificate. The ‘k’ in my name has caused more folks to misspell my name than I can remember, but it’s mine. Now that I’ve had a lifetime with it, I often think of that strong, unnecessary consonant as a small mark Fanny made on me to help keep me upright and strong as the letter itself looks. —Nickole Brow

Happiness, Jane Kenyon

Happiness
by Jane Kenyon


There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon.
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

"Happiness" by Jane Kenyon from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. © Graywolf Press, 1997