Friday, December 4, 2015

a star on the horizon of my heart







Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs. 
It was they who led me from door to door, 
and with them have I felt about me, 
searching and touching my world.

It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt; 
they showed me secret paths, 
they brought before my sight many a star on the horizon of my heart.

They guided me all the day long to the mysteries of the country of pleasure and pain, 
and, at last, 
to what palace gate have they brought me in the evening at the end of my journey?




~ Rabindranath Tagore
art by van gogh



Saturday, November 21, 2015

are animals thinking and feeling?










~ Carl Safina

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

the green cookstove







A lonely man once sat on a large flat stone.
When he lifted it, he saw a kitchen: a green
Enamel range with big claw feet, familiar.
Someone lives in that room, cooking and cackling.

"I saw her once," Virgil said. "She was Helen's
Younger sister."  Helen's betrayed husband
Sits by the window, peeling garlic cloves,
And throwing crusts to Plymouth Rocks.

We'll never understand this, Somewhere below
The flat stone of the skull, a carnivorous couple
Lives and plans future wars.  Are we innocent?
These wars don't happen by accident - they occur

Too regularly. How often do we lift the plate
At the bottom of our brain and throw some garlic
And grain down to the kitchen?  "Keep cooking,
My dears," "Something good will come of this."



~ Robert Bly
from Morning Poems


who one is






One never knows who one is. 
The others tell you who you are, 
don't they? 

And as you're told so a million times 
if you live a long life, in the end you don't know at all 
who you are. Everyone says something different. 
You yourself also say something 
different each new moment.




~  Thomas Bernhard




Sunday, November 8, 2015

first step







The first step in love
is losing your head.

After the petty ego
you then give up your life
and bear the calamity.

With this behind you, proceed:
Polish the ego's rust
from the mirror
of your self



~ Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
from Love's Alchemy
translations by David and Sabrineh Fideler




Tuesday, November 3, 2015

glow






Not a single soul lacks
a pathway to you.

There's no stone,
no flower-
not a single piece of straw-
lacking your existence.

In every particle of the world,
the moon of your love
causes the heart
of each atom to glow.



~ Muhammad Shirin Maghribi  
from Love's Alchemy
Poems from the Sufi Tradition
translations by David and Sabrineh Fideler



Monday, November 2, 2015

a thousand years of joy - the film trailer








Saturday, October 17, 2015

what difference







Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.




~ William Stafford
from Ask Me


Sunday, October 11, 2015

what is happening







Instant to instant
we ask, what is happening?

The sound of shattering everywhere,
is it the world, fragmenting at last,
or our own hearts cracking,
the final break-up of ice?



~ Dorothy Walters
from Marrow of Flame


how much









~  Beth Cioffoletti
 louie louie blog


this moment this love





This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.



Listen, if you can stand to.
Union with the friend
means not being who you have been,
being instead silence, a place,
a view where language is inside seeing.



From the wet source
someone cuts a reed to make a flute
The reed sips breath like wine,
sips more, practicing. Now drunk,
it starts the high clear notes.



There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.



We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.
We can be led by the guide.
Wishes may or may not come true
in this house of disappointment.
Let's push the door open together and leave.



My essence is like the essence of a red wine.
My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.
Glass after glass of wine go into my head.
Finally, my head goes into the wine.




~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks
from The Big Red Book



A clear midnight




This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.





~ Walt Whitman





Friday, October 9, 2015

the wild earth







Even through these trivial crowded days,
I never lose sight of the wild earth on which I live,
of the ravishing perfection of its beauty.
I stand before infinity and look out over a virgin wilderness.

The potential for reproducing fragments
of this in a form worthy of it are endless.



~ Harlan Hubbard
from his journal, January 15, 1987




Wednesday, October 7, 2015

silent journal







Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel 
The word continues to fall 
in splendor around us 
Window half shadow window half moon 
back yard like a book of snow 
That holds nothing and that nothing holds 
Immaculate text 
not too prescient not too true



~ Charles Wright
from Xionia

forgetting words







A water egret planes down like a page of blank paper
Toward the edge of the noon sky.
Let me, like him, find an island of white reeds
To settle down on, under the wind, forgetting words.



~ Charles Wright
 from T’ang Notebook,
 The Other Side of the River: Poems