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)