Toward One Another: Poems of Love
A Poem for Celia Sánchez
We are never without help.
Look for it always
to surprise you.
There is no end to the joy
of discovery
just as there is no end
to amazement.
Those who give their lives
for truth and bread
for the triumphant
flash of a vivid
bougainvillea
even as they
die
in unspeakable
ways
or whose last notice
is of a simple daisy
still striving
in a corner
across
a drying lawn
have never taken
their arms
away
never taken
them away
from being
around us.
Alice Walker, in Taking the Arrow out of the Heart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), 66.
Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. –Acts 2:3
Here’s one thing
you must understand
about this blessing:
it is not
for you alone.
It is stubborn
about this.
Do not even try
to lay hold of it
if you are by yourself,
thinking you can carry it
on your own.
To bear this blessing,
you must first take yourself
to a place where everyone
does not look like you
or think like you,
a place where they do not
believe precisely as you believe,
where their thoughts
and ideas and gestures
are not exact echoes
of your own.
Bring your sorrow.
Bring your grief.
Bring your fear.
Bring your weariness,
your pain,
your disgust at how broken
the world is,
how fractured,
how fragmented
by its fighting,
its wars,
its hungers,
its penchant for power,
its ceaseless repetition
of the history it refuses
to rise above.
I will not tell you
this blessing will fix all that.
But in the place
where you have gathered,
wait.
Watch.
Listen.
Lay aside your inability
to be surprised,
your resistance to what you
do not understand.
See then whether this blessing
turns to flame on your tongue,
sets you to speaking
what you cannot fathom
or opens your ear
to a language
beyond your imagining
that comes as a knowing
in your bones,
a clarity
in your heart
that tells you
this is the reason
we were made:
for this ache
that finally opens us,
for this struggle,
this grace
that scorches us
toward one another
and into
the blazing day.
Jan Richardson, from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons (2015), 169.
I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?
Question and answer time.
“Sir,” a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
“Sir” again. “Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try
to understand them?” he asked. “Do
you want that?” I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
“I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human,”
I started, picking my way care-
fully, for he and I were, after
all, pained by the same dumb longings.
“I try to say what I don’t know
how to say, but of course I can’t
get much of it down at all.”
By now I was sweating bullets.
“I don’t want my poems to be hard,
unless the truth is, if there is
a truth.” Silence hung in the hall
like a heavy fabric. My own
head ached. “Sir,” he yelled. “Thank you. Sir.”
William Matthews, in Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003), 58-59.
The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.
Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.
I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.
Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), 40.
Nothing in my life was crooked or broken.
Or potholed. Not haggard or tired. Not poor
and unfortunate. Nor merely lucky. No one’s
father returned from work with calloused palms
every evening. No one got to where they were
in life with the help of a new-to-the-area teacher,
who stopped at nothing until our dreams came
to fruition. Please. Our parents paid for those
university tours. On weekends, we went out
like families do. The zoo, science museums.
Summers, my parents said I love you,
leaving me at camp where I earned badges
spinning twigs until sparks spilled out.
In September, no one came to class
with torn or tattered clothes. No one
got beat up for being less than. Please.
Boyhood was a ballad. Our parents sang
when they bathed our brothers. No one
became what this world carved
out of desperation. When it rained,
we got picked up from school. At home,
a change of clothes sat on our beds. Yes,
we all had our own beds. Yes, each of us
had our own rooms, as well. We made boats
out of egg cartons. There were no gunshots
or helicopters to stop us from sailing those ships
down the not-so-flooded street. With the world
ahead, we opened our small yellow umbrellas
a sudden burst of sunlight we walked right into.
Michael Torres, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020)
everything here
seems to need us
Rainer Maria Rilke
I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
Ellen Bass, Like a Beggar (2014).
Gather your mistakes,
rinse them with honesty
and self-reflection,
let dry until you
can see every choice
and the regret
becomes brittle,
cover the
entire surface
in forgiveness,
remind yourself
that you are human
and this too
is a gift.
Rudy Francisco, Helium (Button Poetry), 2017.
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent
Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people on earth.
Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here
Tom Wayman, in Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003), 37-38.
for Snowden
And when they spy
on us
let them discover
us
loving—
it really doesn’t
matter what we are loving
let it be
an exercise
of the heart.
You can begin
with
your car—
if that has been
your training.
After all
the great ones
tell us
it is all about
and by any means
necessary
opening the heart.
It could be
your dog—
that is where
most of my friends
and I
would be found.
It could be
desert
or mountain
river
or a peculiar
bend
in a lonely road
that makes you
ache
with longing.
Let them find us
deep in
the conspiracy
(breathing together)
of love—
our hearts open;
resigned to being
these
sometimes ridiculous
and always vulnerable
human beings
that those
who have no
experience that
love can exist
in this world
must spy
upon.
Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow out of the Heart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), 86-87.
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell, in Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003), 120.
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
Mary Oliver, Felicity (2016), 9.
Afraid of computer viruses
Afraid of terrorists
Afraid of the planetary extinction
of our current paths
of spreading diseases
of urban crime rates
drug lords owning governments
torture as a commonplace weapon
and humanless drones
with only a button to press
to explode life to smatters and splinters
only a law to pass to steal it all
Fearless love is the only defense
to face the morning light
Greedy power in my face like in yours
wants to make us forget
But we cannot forget this nagging feeling hardwired in the bones
wanting to belong snugly
in the next of our planet
be accepted fully because we exist
and not for our documents, licenses, and wealth
From that innate primordial desire comes our fearless love
peeking around the polluted rubble of destruction
the abandoned gas stations the poisoned waterways
We look beyond and see other heads bobbing up
and down
beaming the signal
calling to us to show our fearless love
in the face of everything
Fearless love the daily challenge
Ready or not
it is here
Nina Serrano, in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), 156.
She entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. —Luke 1:40
You hardly knew
how hungry you were
to be gathered in,
to receive the welcome
that invited you to enter
entirely—
nothing of you
found foreign or strange,
nothing of your life
that you were asked
to leave behind
or to carry in silence
or in shame.
Tentative steps
became settling in,
leaning into the blessing
that enfolded you,
taking your place
in the circle
that stunned you
with its unimagined grace.
You began to breathe again,
to move without fear,
to speak with abandon
the words you carried
in your bones,
that echoed in your being.
You learned to sing.
But the deal with this blessing
is that it will not leave you alone,
will not let you linger
in safety,
in stasis.
The time will come
when this blessing
will ask you to leave,
not because it has tired of you
but because it desires for you
to become the sanctuary
that you have found—
to speak your word
into the world,
to tell what you have heard
with your own ears,
seen with your own eyes,
known in your own heart:
that you are beloved,
precious child of God,
beautiful to behold,*
and you are welcome
and more than welcome
here.
*Thanks to the Rev. Janet Wolf and the congregation of Hobson United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, for the story in which these words—“beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold”—were offered to help transform the life of a member of their community. The story appears in The Upper Room Disciplines 1999 (Nashville: The Upper Room).
Jan Richardson, in Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons (Wanton Gospeller Press, 2015), 55-57.
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
Eaven Boland, New Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008)
Why We Tell Stories: Poems of Remembering
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses (W. W. Norton, 2008)
for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters
One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring.
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—
O Miraculous Many Gone—
O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—
Is this love the trouble you promised?
Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018).
I come from a long line of Mexican women
who washed their clothes on washboards in a bucket,
who worked in the fields,
who worked as maids in wealthy households,
who made tortillas at dawn
and boiled beans at dusk,
fed the chickens in their backyards,
watered their lush green plants,
disciplined their children,
and rarely questioned their husbands.
These women fought to survive
swallowed their tears
hid their fears.
My foremothers never gave up;
even when times were difficult they took
hardship with dignity.
My great-grandmother and grandmothers
were women who went to church
and prayed
had faith
and believed in God.
They were excellent mothers and wives,
the cornerstones of the family.
My mother was strong
when her husband cheated on her,
beat her,
verbally abused her,
then left her with two children
standing by his closed casket.
My aunt was wild,
adventurous, hilarious,
fun loving,
and abandoned by her only love
with a child to care for all alone.
These women were survivors
whose blood runs through my veins.
Yes,
I come from a long line of women
tough as nails,
hard as steel,
soft like velvet,
exquisite,
sweet like pan dulce,
full of wisdom,
stories,
secrets that will never be told.
They are my past,
they are my present,
they are my future.
They live in my heart,
these women with lyrical voices,
they are what brings me to keep walking
when all I want to do is go into a deep dark sleep
and never wake up.
They keep me alive when
I feel too weary to go on.
They are the force
that reaches out to touch my soul,
they are the hands that lift me up when I have failed,
they bathe me when I am covered in mud.
They are my foremothers,
they are the past,
they are the present,
they are the future,
they are the ones who live on.
Nancy Aidé González, in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), 77-78.
in remembrance of the 739 people who lost their lives that week in 1995.
one summer in Chicago the people baked to death in brick,
mouths open for water or to say my lord
or to say I love you mama or to sing
or their eyes closed and they died in their sleep,
sweat spelling the shape of an angel against floral patterns
spilling into the quilted stitching a new map:
not just one river but many, tracing an X and an X and another
full of salt water like the coasts we never met.
that summer or maybe it was
the summer before or
another summer or
every summer,
we lay on our backs,
the one good comforter protecting us
from the nails and staples in the floorboards
that would have etched their little brands
into our still-baby skin, metal pressing through
my thin cotton undershirt like a toothache
in my pillowcase I hid books and used Kleenex.
each night I listened to my brother wheeze.
I prayed for rain to come.
I said I love you
I didn’t say it’s too hot to breathe right
I said goodnight
I didn’t say whether I would give up or not
I said this is still home
I said my lord
Eve L. Ewing, 1919: Poems (Haymarket Books, 2019), 63.
To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.
To the one at the back of the empty bus.
To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall.
To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past.
To the one who loses with the deck he marked.
To those who are destined to inherit the meek.
To us.
In Naomi Shihab Nye, ed., What Have You Lost? (Greenwillow Books, 1999), 2.
for Fabbio Doplicher
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a couple matters over (what’s
a cheap date, they asked us; what’s
flat drink). Among Italian literati
we could recognize our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib—and there was one
administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans
were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
“What’s poetry?”
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think—”The truth
is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
And poetry—
(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.
Heather McCugh, in Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003), 269-72.
Dedicated to La Bloga and all Poets Responding to SB 1070
no choice
but to speak out—
loud about injustice
those who must hide have no voice, just
slashed tongues
they hide
while being used
by people who speak lies.
they work, live silently in fear
waiting
who then
will speak for us
when others turn away
who joins in solidarity—
speaks up
unearth
muted voices
teach them new songs to sing
dedicate them poems for peace—
flowers
flor y canto
poder—[power]
sweet medicine to heal
fear, hatred and yes, to demand
justice
Odilia Galván Rodríguez, in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), 70.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/poets-responding/poem-25-giving-voice-by-odilia-galv%C3%A1n-rodr%C3%ADguez/200006206702924/
For Linda Nemec Foster
1
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak
2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees
3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life
Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it
the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them
and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and
Lisel Mueller, Alive Together (1996), 150-51.
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Maria Howe, What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1988)
http://poetrysuperhighway.com/cobalt/040114.pdf
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Maria Howe, What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1988)
Arizona dirt, warm and thick
Place where I am rooted
Planted here because my abuelos had to choose
Which side of our mother’s severed body
They would cling to.
They embraced Texas
Where the high desert didn’t change just because there was a border
Where the river still carried their songs,
Where they could feel the heartbeat of the earth beneath them.
Until, tired of being
Mexicans Not Allowed
Mexicans Not Served
Mexicans Not Welcome
Mexicans Not Wanted
In stores, in schools, in lands
Where their bones and blood filled the earth,
Where they belonged,
They gathered up their sorrows and headed west.
Like hormiguitas pacing ancient paths,
Searching frantically for the scent of the familiar,
They found the long tunnel home here
In Arizona dirt, warm and thick.
And I’m not leaving now
Just because you want this land.
You say
Illegals Not Allowed
Illegals Not Served
Illegals Not Welcome
Illegals Not Wanted
And we hear the voices of long ago
Still shouting
Still trying to push us away.
But we are not leaving now
Just because you want this land.
We are already home.
Andrea Hernández Holm, in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), 90.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/poets-responding/where-we-belong-by-andrea-hernandez-holm/114028598634019/
You were born
remembering this blessing.
It has never
not been with you,
weaving itself daily
through the threads of
each story, each dream,
each word you spoke
or received,
everything you hoped,
each person you loved,
all that you lost
with astonishing sorrow,
all that you welcomed
with unimagined joy.
I tell you,
you bear this blessing
in your bones.
But if the day should come
when you can no longer
bring this blessing
to mind,
we will hold it
for you.
We will remember it
for you.
And when
the time comes,
we will breathe
this blessing to you
at the last,
as you are gathered
into the place
where all that
has been lost
finds its way back
to you,
where all memory
returns to you,
where you know yourself
unforgotten
and entirely welcomed
home.
Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief (Wanton Gospeller Press, 2016), 126-27.
Your Day Is So Wide: Poems of the Present
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets
“Time thus appears to be composed of moments—things, or things-moments. And the artist in their work has to capture and to preserve one moment, which becomes, indeed, eternal. In that way time is valorized; its every small part deserves an alert noting down of its shape and color.”
Czesław Miłosz, A Book of Luminous Things (1996), xviii
Get out of bed.
The day has been
asking about you.
It dragged the sun into your
room this morning,
pulled an entire disco of light
through your curtains,
hoping that all of this gleam
would be enough to get your attention.
This is how today says,
notice me.
Rudy Francisco, Helium (Button Poetry, 2017), 7.
Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow
before he became St. Augustine.
Mary Oliver, Felicity (2016), 3.
I’m reading The Little Flower
on the train out of London:
a book that says we can only do
small things with great attention.
Next to me, a suited, stiletto-heeled
commuter hides her title.
But when she leaves for coffee,
I look. Chapter one: Focus on your core
genius now! Reject rejection!
Sort out incompleteness—Now!
I think no human needs the stress
of so many exclamations in one life.
I breathe, look outside the window.
The grass, praise be, joyfully illiterate,
is free of such nonsense. It swaddles
every creature’s foot in tender ignorance.
The lemon balm I crush for tea
releases its scent when dying.
To suffer? To bear one’s cross?
So out of vogue.
Outside, magnolias lift their lemon
cups to no one and to everyone
whether or not we notice.
The world bears its loveliness
on broken limbs.
Perfection? Let us
begin by shattering
its unholy idols.
Dana Littlepage Smith, in Image 79 (2013), 75.
Before leaping into something, remember
the span of time is long and gracious.
No one perches dangerously on any cliff
till you reply. Is there a pouch of rain
desperately thirsty people wait to drink from
if you say yes or no? I don’t think so.
Never embrace “crucial” or “urgent”—
maybe for them?
Those are not your words.
Hold your horses and your mania and these
Hong Kong dollar coins in your pocket.
I’m not a corner or a critical turning page.
Wait. I’ll think about it.
This pressure you share is a fantasy,
a misplaced hinge.
Maybe I’m already where I need to be.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), 131.
And so all people run after time, Lord.
They pass through life running –
Hurried, jostled, overburdened, frantic, and they never get there.
They haven’t time.
In spite of all their efforts they’re still short of time,
Of a great deal of time.
Lord, you must have made a mistake in your calculations.
There is a big mistake somewhere.
The hours are too short,
The days are too short,
Our lives are too short.
You who are beyond time, Lord, you smile to see us fighting it.
And you know what you are doing.
You make no mistakes in your distribution of time to us.
You give each one time to do what you want us to do.
But we must not lose time!
Waste time,
Kill time,
For time is a gift that you give us,
But a perishable gift,
A gift that does not keep.
Lord, I have time,
I have plenty of time,
All the time that you give me,
The years of my life,
The days of my years,
The hours of my days,
They are all mine.
Mine to fill, quietly, calmly,
But to fill completely, up to the brim,
To offer them to you, that of their insipid water
You may make a rich wine
Such as you made once in Cana of Galilee.
I am not asking you tonight, Lord,
for time to do this and then that,
But your grace to do conscientiously,
in the time that you give me, what you want me to do.
Michael Quoist, Prayers of Life (1963), 76-78
For the wind no one expected
For the boy who does not know the answer
For the graceful handle I found in a field
attached to nothing
pray it is universally applicable
For our tracks which disappear
the moment we leave them
For the face peering through the cafe window
as we sip our soup
For cheerful American classrooms sparkling
with crisp colored alphabets
happy cat posters
the cage of the guinea pig
the dog with division flying out of his tail
and the classrooms of our cousins
on the other side of the earth
how solemn they are
how gray or green or plain
how there is nothing dangling
nothing striped or polka-dotted or cheery
no self-portraits or visions of cupids
and in these rooms the students raise their hands
and learn the stories of the world
For library books in alphabetical order
and family businesses that failed
and the house with the boarded windows
and the gap in the middle of a sentence
and the envelope we keep mailing ourselves
For every hopeful morning given and given
and every future rough edge
and every afternoon
turning over in its sleep
Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), 44.
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (2012), 1.
Every so often, I awaken and find
the world both vivid and lit, each element
—far as I can tell—lit from within. And yes,
like you, I may have assumed this radiance
to be a trick of morning sun upon the sea,
or the fortunate effect of ambient or
of manufactured light, of dumb or less
dumb luck. What I should not make clear
is that this intermittent waking is not
quite so literal as you are supposing, nor
so mundane; in fact, I may have been jogging, or
yammering on before a yawning class,
writing something or other on the blackboard.
I may have appeared more or less awake
right along, but suddenly, with little warning, I become
for the moment more fully awake, and I see
that there—along the path, among the bracken
or the pine, or just there, only now opening
with each forlorn face before me—a glistening
a quality, a presence of light so profound
I can’t but close my eyes to see.
Scott Cairns, Idiot Psalms (2014), 29.
The morning sun is so pale
I could be looking at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
peering down at me now in my bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But this light is only the first line
in the five-act play of this day-
the only day in existence-
or the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
these thin bedroom curtains
as the beginning of a lecture
I must listen to until dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling.
Billy Collins, Nine Horses (2002)
—because the first must be first
—MILOSZ
And the first, if you don’t mind me saying, is both an uttered
notion of the truth and a provisional, even giddy apprehension
of its reach. The day—fortunately, a winter’s day—is censed
with wood smoke, and the wood smoke is remarkably, is richly
spiced with evergreen; you can almost taste the resin.
Or, I can. Who knows what you’ll manage? The day itself
is shrouded, wrapped, or tucked, say, within a veil of wood smoke
and low cloud, and decidedly gray, but lined as well with intermittent,
slanted rays of startlingly brilliant, impossibly white light just here,
and over there, and they move a bit, shifting round as high weather
shoves the clouds about. Theology is a distinctly rare, a puzzling
study, given that its practitioners are happiest when the terms
of their discovery fall well short of their projected point; this
is where they likely glimpse their proof. Rare as well
is the theologian’s primary stipulation that all that is explicable
is somewhat less than interesting. In any case, the day
keeps loping right along, and blurs into the night, which itself
will fairly likely press into another clouded day, et cetera.
The future isn’t written, isn’t fixed, and the proof of that is how
sure we are—if modestly—that every moment matters.
Take this one, now. We stand before another day extending like
a scarf of cloud, or wood smoke, or incense reaching past what’s visible.
And sure, you could as easily rush ahead, abandoning what lies in reach
in favor of what doesn’t—but you don’t, and we here at your side are pleased
to have you with us, supposing that we’ll make the way together.
Scott Cairns, Idiot Psalms (2014), 17-18.
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Jane Kenyon, in Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003), 133.
Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday,
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.
Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001).
“Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.”
—William Stafford
Some birds hide in leaves so effectively
you don’t see they’re all around you.
Brown tilted heads, observing human maneuvers
on a sidewalk. Was that a crumb someone threw?
Picking and poking, no fanfare for company,
gray huddle on a branch, blending in.
Attention deeper than a whole day.
Who says, I’ll be a thoughtful bird when I grow up?
Stay humble, blend, belong to all directions.
Fly low, love a shadow. And sing, sing freely,
never let anything get in the way of your singing,
not darkness, not winter,
not the cries of flashier birds, not the silence
that finds you steadfast
pen ready, at the edge of four a.m.
Your day is so wide it will outlive everyone.
It has no roof, no sides.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), 80.
Availing space in which we live and move,
and chance to glimpse the trembling import of
our late, suspected being—and, well, yes,
the opening occasion of a guess
that, when we’re after meaning, more is always
likelier to please than the common taste
for less with which our eager suppositions
are in the main rewarded. I’m thinking such
lacunae as this cove may lend us all their
latent agency each and every time
we enter, willing to attend the puzzle,
leaning in to ambiguity, aloof
to any fear accompanying what bit
we witness in the local, endless, fraught
fragility of every passing scene.
Keep up. I, too, had chance occasion, once,
to lean, to choose between two such modes of travel—
that of knowing, clearly, what I meant to see
and, on the other hand, not so sure, but eager
for the roads’ divergences to obtain
to something skirting lumination.
If I sigh now, it’s now so much for me
as for the prospect of a road constructed
as we go, bearing both our burdens and
ourselves, always just ahead, and bearing on.
And sure, we’re hoping to proceed, to get
somewhere, and much of our attention speeds ahead.
My point, I now suppose, has more to do
with honoring the road itself, the ragged,
dust-glazed bracken by the side, and giving
each attendant host its due—the roebuck,
woodchuck, turtle, and the toad, the hawk
the raucous jay or raven yammering,
the fleet and near-angelic wren and chickadee,
the modest beetle, humble bee, blind ant.
Scott Cairns, Idiot Psalms (2014)
The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.
While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (2012), 69.
I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
as if it were a portent.
Faster and faster it rolled,
with me running after it
bent low, gritting my teeth,
and I found myself doubled over
and rolling down the street
head over heels, one complete somersault
after another like a bagel
and strangely happy with myself.
David Ignatow, in Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003), 143.
She writes to me—
I can’t sleep because I’m seventeen
Sometimes I lie awake thinking
I didn’t even clean my room yet
And soon I will be twenty-five
And a failure
And when I am fifty—oh!
I write her back
Slowly slow
Clean one drawer
Arrange words on a page
Let them find one another
Find you
Trust they might know something
You aren’t living the whole thing
At once
That’s what a minute said to an hour
Without me you are nothing
Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), 1.
occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.
All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows’ ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.
Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.
Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me.
Ronald Wallace, Long for This World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003).
When the giant moon
rises over the river,
the cat stretches,
presses himself to the window,
croons.
He needs to go outside
into dark grass
to feel the mystery
combing his fur.
The wind never says
Call me back,
I’ll be waiting for your call.
All we know about wind’s address is
somewhere else.
A peony has been trying to get through to you
When’s the last time you really looked at one?
Billowing pinkish whitish petals lushly layered
Might be the prime object of the universe
Peonies in a house
profoundly uplift the house
never say no to peonies
Some days reviewing everything
from brain’s balcony
filigree of thinking a calm comes in
you can’t fix the whole street change the city
or the world
but clearing bits of rubbish possible
moving one stone
Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), 7-8.
As long as you’re dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.
Sometimes there are no rules.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (2012), 19.
Risking Enchantment: Poems of Awe
“Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.”
Czesław Miłosz, A Book of Luminous Things (1996), xvi
Almost everything I know is glad
to be born—not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nesting, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.
Almost everything I’ve seen pushes
toward the place of that state as if there were
no knowing any other—the violent crack
and seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning
for luck toward birth by water.
And I’m fairly shocked to consider
all the bludgeonings and batterings going on
continually, the head-rammings, wing-furors,
and beak-crackings, fighting for release
inside gelatinous shells, leather shells,
calcium shells or rough, horny shells. Legs
and shoulder, knees and elbows flail likewise
against their womb walls everywhere, in pine
forest niches, seepage banks and boggy
prairies, among savannah grasses, on woven
mats and perfumed linen sheets.
Mad zealots, every one, even before
beginning they are dark dust-congealings
of pure frenzy to come into light.
Almost everything I know rages to be born,
the obsession founding itself explicitly
in the coming bone harps and ladders,
the heart-thrusts, vessels and voices
of all those speeding with clear and total
fury toward this singular honor.
Pattiann Rogers, Eating Bread and Honey (Milkweed Editions, 1997).
by the randomness
of the way
the rocks tumbled
ages ago
the water pours
it pours
it pours
ever along the slant
of downgrade
dashing its silver thumbs
against the rocks
or pausing to carve
a sudden curled space
where the flashing fish
splash or drowse
while the kingfisher overhead
rattles and stares
and so it continues for miles
this bolt of light,
its only industry
to descend
and to be beautiful
while it does so;
as for purpose
there is none,
it is simply
one of those gorgeous things
that was made
to do what it does perfectly
and to last,
as almost nothing does,
almost forever.
Mary Oliver, Blue Horses (2014), 11-12.
And we love life if we find a way to it.
We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees.
We love life if we find a way to it.
And we steal from the silkworm a thread to build a sky and fence in this departure.
We open the garden gate for the jasmine to go out as a beautiful day on the streets.
We love life if we find a way to it.
And we plant, where we settle, some fast growing plants, and harvest the dead.
We play the flute like the color of the faraway, sketch over the dirt corridor a neigh.
We write our names one stone at a time, O lightning make the night a bit clearer.
We love life if we find a way to it . . .
Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, in The Nation (September 15, 2008 issue). https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/and-we-love-life/
Why do people keep asking to see
God’s identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
is more than enough?
Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.
Think of Sheba approaching
the kingdom of Solomon.
Do you think she had to ask,
“Is this the place?”
Mary Oliver, Felicity (2016), 19.
1
Because I exist
2
Because there must be a reason
why I should cast a shadow
3
So that good can try to be better
and become best
and beginning grow into middle and end
4
So the round earth can have its corners
and the house will not fall down around me
So the seasons will go on holding hands
and the string quartet play forever
5
For the invention of Milton and Shakespeare
and the older invention
of the wild rose, mother
to the petals
of my hand
6
Because
five
senses
are
not
enough
7
Because luck
is always odd
and the division
of history
into lean and fat
years
mysterious
8
To make the spider
possible
and the black ball which tells me
the game is up
but also to let
the noise of the world
make itself heard
as music
9
For the orbit of Jupiter
Saturn
Venus
Mars
Mercury
Uranus
Mickey Mantle
Lou Gehrig
Babe Ruth
10
Created functionless, for the sheer play
of the mind in its tens of thousands of moves
There is nothing like it in nature
Lisel Mueller, Alive Together (1996), 180-81.
“Anything worth thinking about is worth
singing about.”
Which is why we have
songs of praise, songs of love, songs
of sorrow.
Songs to the gods, who have
so many names.
Songs the shepherds sing, on the
lonely mountains, while the sheep
are honoring the grass, by eating it.
The dance-songs of the bees, to tell
where the flowers, suddenly, in the
morning light, have opened.
A chorus of many, shouting to heaven,
or at it, or pleading.
Or that greatest of love affairs, a violin
and a human body.
And a composer, maybe hundreds of years dead.
I think of Schubert, scribbling on a café
napkin.
Thank you, thank you.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (2012), 17-18.
Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,
the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
Derek Walcott, The Fortunate Traveler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
A Choice and a Gift: Poems of Hope
“I believe we require a leap of hope.”
“When two people come together to listen, to learn from each other, there is hope. This is where humanity begins, where peace begins, where dignity begins: in a small gesture of respect, in listening.”
“Hope is a choice, and it is a gift we give to one another. It can be absurd. It does not rely on facts. It is simply a choice. Once you make that choice, to create hope, then you can look at evil without flinching, without failing. And this is the first step to fighting it, to protesting it.”
Elie Wiesel, qtd. in Ariel Burger, Witness, 184, 186
for Stephane Hessel, who seemed to know
Even on those days
the news is fully bad.
And all you can do is get out of bed
and failing that
give thanks you have a bed not to get out of.
What does it take to make us smile
when we feel the sword of anger
and hatred
sharp against the backs
of our peaceful necks?
What does it take
to make us stand together
as if we just grew that way?
What does it take to know
the day of peace and justice
will one day come?
No matter who
is so badly
directing traffic?
What does it take
to feel a joy so strong
you can almost levitate?
All it takes, really,
is presence,
knowing that you, and those who feel
as you do,
ignoring roadblocks
will arrive.
Will brave the flights, the slights,
the nights of wondering
if and why:
the years of pain sometimes required
to know
where it is most essential
to appear.
Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow out of the Heart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), 69.
For Ash Wednesday
As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.
–2 Corinthians 6:1
All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—
Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?
This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.
This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.
So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.
Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons (2016), 89-90.
for Sundus Shaker Saleh, Iraqi mother, with my love
In our despair that justice is slow
we sit with heads bowed
wondering
how
even whether
we will ever be healed.
Perhaps it is a question
only the ravaged
the violated
seriously ask.
And is that not now
almost all of us?
But hope is on the way.
As usual Hope is a woman
herding her children
around her
all she retains of who
she was; as usual
except for her kids
she has lost almost everything.
Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.
Along with her home, her employment, her parents,
her olive trees, her grapes. The peace of independence;
the reassuring noises of ordinary neighbors.
Hope rises, She always does,
did we fail to notice this in all the stories
they’ve tried to suppress?
Hope rises,
and she puts on her same
unfashionable threadbare cloak
and, penniless, she flings herself
against the cold, polished, protective chain mail
of the very powerful
the very rich – chain mail that mimics
suspiciously silver coins
and lizard scales –
and all she has to fight with is the reality of what was done to her;
to her country; her people; her children;
her home.
All she has as armor is what she has learned
must never be done.
Not in the name of War
and especially never in the
name of Peace.
Hope is always the teacher
with the toughest homework.
Our assignment: to grasp
what has never been breathed in our stolen
Empire
on the hill:
Without justice, we will never
be healed.
For more information about this inspiring standing up of a mother of five, visit www.codepink.org.
Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow out of the Heart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), 81-82.
It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
Lisel Mueller, Alive Together (1996), 103.
What would you do if you knew
that even during wartime
scholars in Baghdad
were translating your poems
into Arabic
still believing
in the thing with feathers?
You wouldn’t feel lonely
That’s for sure.
Words finding friends
even if written on envelope flaps
or left in a drawer.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), 40.
Hoping against hope, he believed. —Romans 4:18
Hope nonetheless.
Hope despite.
Hope regardless.
Hope still.
Hope where we had ceased to hope.
Hope amid what threatens hope.
Hope with those who feed our hope.
Hope beyond what we had hoped.
Hope that draws us past our limits.
Hope that defies expectations.
Hope that questions what we have known.
Hope that makes a way where there is none.
Hope that takes us past our fear.
Hope that calls us into life.
Hope that holds us beyond death.
Hope that blesses those to come.
Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons (2016), 108.
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (2012), 27-28.
We were marching long before
We even knew how to walk,
Before there was a notion of you or me—
Just a hope that there would be
One more generation of our people,
And another after that.
Our nanas marched us out of their wombs
To the rhythm of the drum
And we kept on marching, walking
Dancing, and singing
Until our praises were carried
In all directions
So that our ancestors would know we were here.
We march
Through sorrow and joy.
We march
When we are happy
And when we are angry.
We have marched from the belly of the earth
Through the deserts and mountains and rivers,
In the canyons and forests,
By the moonlight and the sunlight,
In the rain and the snow and the heat.
You can see the pattern of our journey
In the stars above.
We march until our voices are too weak
To sing us further.
We march until we are heavy with sweat.
We march to exhaustion.
We march until we bleed,
And still we march.
We make sense of the universe
When we march.
The pounding of our feet reverberates,
Returns to the life force
In all that surrounds us.
We do not march for ourselves.
We are only bodies of energy,
Our lives are but brief moments in time.
We march in the hope that there will be
One more generation of our people
And another after that.
Andrea Hernández Holm, in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), 91-92.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/poets-responding/in-response-to-the-man-who-asked-why-do-your-people-march-for-everything-by-andr/157244757645736/
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come 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, Standing by Words (Counterpoint, 1983)
“The sun will be darkened . . . and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” —Mark 13:24-25
Look, the world
is always ending
somewhere.
Somewhere
the sun has come
crashing down.
Somewhere
it has gone
completely dark.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the gun,
the knife,
the fist.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the slammed door,
the shattered hope.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the utter quiet
that follows the news
from the phone,
the television,
the hospital room.
Somewhere
it has ended
with a tenderness
that will break
your heart.
But, listen,
this blessing means
to be anything
but morose.
It has not come
to cause despair.
It is simply here
because there is nothing
a blessing
is better suited for
than an ending,
nothing that cries out more
for a blessing
than when a world
is falling apart.
This blessing
will not fix you,
will not mend you,
will not give you
false comfort;
it will not talk to you
about one door opening
when another one closes.
It will simply
sit itself beside you
among the shards
and gently turn your face
toward the direction
from which the light
will come,
gathering itself
about you
as the world begins
again.
Jan Richardson, in Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons (Wanton Gospeller Press, 2015), 34-35.
I am telling you
Discouraged One
we will win.
And I will show you
why.
We are the offspring
of the ignorantly
discarded:
we conjure
sunrise
with our smiles
and provoke music
out of trash.
Who can completely
disappear
such genius?
This is why humanity
is worth
loving.
Fiercely.
Passionately.
Without a moment
of holding back.
I used to think
it was only
Africans
I loved so dangerously
then I thought it was
Indians;
then Mexicans
Vietnamese
Guatemalans
Cambodians
Laotians
Nicaraguans
Cubans
Haitians
Salvadorans…
all
those dear ones
so endlessly
lied about.
But no, it is all of us.
It is humanity.
We are special.
If you don’t believe me
take the time to awaken
and truly witness
yourself.
Alice Walker, in Taking the Arrow out of the Heart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), 64-65
The grains shall be collected
From the thousand shores
To which they found their way,
And the boulder restored,
And the boulder itself replaced
In the cliff, and likewise
The cliff shall rise
Or subside until the plate of earth
Is without fissure. Restoration
Knows no half-measure. It will
Not stop when the treasured and lost
Bronze horse remounts the steps.
Even this horse will founder backward
To coin, cannon, and domestic pots,
Which themselves shall bubble and
Drain back to green veins in stone.
And every word written shall lift off
Letter by letter, the backward text
Read ever briefer, ever more antic
In its effort to insist that nothing
Shall be lost.
Kay Ryan, in Elephant Rocks (Grove Press, 1996).
So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:
hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,
hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,
hope that has breath
and a beating heart,
hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,
hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,
hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,
hope that raises us
from the dead—
not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.
Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief (Wanton Gospeller Press, 2016), 172-73.
Never Quite Sufficient: Poems of Words
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T.S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets
the princess i was born
a little bookmad.
i could be found stroking
the spines of books
while i sat locked alone
inside my tower bedroom.
all the while, i hoped my books
would spill their exquisite words
over the lush green carpet
so i could collect them one by one
& savor them like
berries inside my mouth.
– forever a collector of words
Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (2017)
which is why I cannot mind so much observing
how words are more precise or less precise, but they
are not exact. Not ever. No. And yes, each prove
solicitous and pleasant on the tongue, and more
than a little tolerant of one’s most earnest
yammering; still, the promise of each word abides
within its endless, largely inarticulate expanse,
thank God. The dancing figures of the utterance
forever spin their circles; they forever turn
upon the sawdust littered floor. And even as
I speak I see my good intentions leaping clean
beyond my reach, and each for its duration lifts
the stillness into trouble. For its bright moment,
each obtains for us a little taste of what lit
distance one might entertain, thus irreducible.
Scott Cairns, Idiot Psalms (2014), 11.
at what crossing
could my poems
become bread
or water to offer
a people
the thousands
who cross so many
miles of misery
perched on trains
like birds
with clipped wings
who only fly
in their dreams
but decide to search
out the promise of
a better life at any cost
which of my
careful word choices
make a difference
to scorched tongues
that can no longer
even form a whisper
let alone cry out for help
in a desolate desert
there are no
flights on 747s
for a people
with only prayers
without papers
thick with words
that legitimize them
in an illegal world
full of legalized criminals
that form tempests
to tease out fear and
who year after year
think up new ways to hate
at the same time taking
even a person’s last breath
if it benefits their profits
at what checkpoint
do my words become
more than arrows
sharp in their bite
or mere criticisms of the “Right”
still not hitting the target
or putting an end
to this war
Odilia Galván Rodríguez, in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), 71-72.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/poets-responding/border-inquest-blues-by-odilia-galv%C3%A1n-rodr%C3%ADguez/212138342156377/
What I have come to say is never quite
sufficient; what I have come to say falls
ever short, if reliably—my one,
my only certainty. This fact, for now,
can prove both deep discouragement and deep,
elusive hope. I’ve come to trust our words’
most modest crap shoot; I have come, as well,
to see their limit as my proof. If, one
fresh morning, I should come to apprehend
how ever full with presence every breath
now is—and even now—I have a sense
my words would grow so heavy as to still.
I suppose that morning then would open
to our eighth day, whose sunrise will not set.
—for Warren Farha
Scott Cairns, Idiot Psalms (2014), 38.
I keep translating traduzco continuamente
entre palabras words que no son las mías
into other words which are mine de palabras a mis palabras.
Y, finalmente, de quién es el texto? Who has written it?
Del escritor o del traductor writer, translator
o de los idiomas or language itself?
Somos fantasmas, nosotros traductores, que viven
entre aquel mundo y el nuestro
between that world and our own.
Pero poco a poco me ocurre
que el problema the problem no es cuestión
de lo que se pierde en traducción
is not a question
of what gets lost in translation
sino but rather lo que se pierde
what gets lost
entre la ocurrencia – sea de amor o de desesperación
between love or desperation –
y el hecho de que llega
a existir en palabras
and its coming into words.
Para nosotros todos, amantes, habladores
as lovers or users of words
el problema es éste this is the difficulty.
Lo que se pierde what gets lost
no es lo que se pierde en traducción sino
is not what gets lost in translation, but rather
what gets lost in language itself lo que se pierde
en el hecho, en la lengua,
en la palabra misma.
Alastair Reid, in Naomi Shihab Nye, ed., What Have You Lost? (Greenwillow Boks, 1999), 62-63.