in cloudy speech

God speaks to each of us before we are,

Before he's formed us — then, in cloudy speech,

But only then, he speaks these words to each

And silently walks with us from the dark:

Driven by your senses, dare

To the edge of longing. Grow

Like a fire's shadowcasting glare

Behind assembled things, so you can spread

Their shapes on me as clothes.

Don't leave me bare.

Let it all happen to you: beauty and dread.

Simply go — no feeling is too much —

And only this way can we stay in touch.

Near here is the land

That they call Life.

You'll know when you arrive

By how real it is.

Give me your hand.

~  Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translation by Leonard Cottrell)

Evening

.

.

Slowly the evening puts on the garments

held for it by a rim of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands divide from you,

one going heavenward, one that falls;

.

and leave you, to neither quite belonging, 

not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,

not quite so surely pledging the eternal

as that which grows star each night and climbs-

.

and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)

your life afraid and huge and ripening,

so that it, now bound in and now embracing, 

grows alternately stone in you and star.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow)

.

BECOMING HUMAN

.

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about

“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,

“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

.

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

.

He looked surprised and said,

“I am speaking of sublime visions

And you ask 

About goats!”

.

And I spoke again saying,

“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

.

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

.

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,

“Four.”

.

“How many rose bushes in your garden,

How many children,

Are your parents still alive,

Do you feed the birds in winter?”

.

And to all he answered.

.

Then I said,

“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,

I would say that they were if they make you become

More human,

.

More kind to every creature and plant

That you know."

.

~ Hafiz

(“The Gift” – translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

This is now

.

.

This is now. Now is,

all there is. Don't wait for Then;

strike the spark, light the fire.

.

Sit at the Beloved's table,

feast with gusto, drink your fill

.

then dance

the way branches

of jasmine and cypress

dance in a spring wind.

.

The green earth

is your cloth;

tailor your robe

with dignity and grace.

.

~ Rumi

.

Why, then have to be human?

.

.

Why, then have to be human?

Oh, not because happiness exists,

Nor out of curiosity...

But because being here means so much;

Because everything here,

Vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,

And strangely keeps calling to us... To have been

Here once, completely, even if only once,

To have been at one with the earth -

This is beyond undoing.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Everything is plundered

.

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

from Poems of Akhmatova
 edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward

.

When Death Comes

.

.

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

.

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

.

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

.

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

.

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

.

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 

as a field daisy, and as singular,

.

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,

.

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened

or full of argument.

.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

.

~ Mary Oliver

(New and Selected Poems, Volume I)

.

Miracles

.

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge

of the water, 

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed

at night with anyone I love,

Or sit at the table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honeybees busy around the hive

of a summer forenoon, 

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining

so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon

in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread

with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim-the rocks-the motion of the waves

-the ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

.

~ Walt Whitman

(Leaves of Grass)

Remembrance

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing

which would infinitely enrich your life:

the powerful, uniquely uncommon,

the awakening of dormant stones,

depths that would reveal you to yourself.

In the dusk you notice the book shelves

with their volumes in gold and in brown;

and you think of far lands you journeyed,

of pictures and of shimmering gowns

worn by women you conquered and lost.

And it comes to you all of a sudden:

That was it! And you arise, for you are

aware of a year in your distant past

with its fears and events and prayers.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(The Book of Images, trans. by Albert Ernest Flemming)

The wind, one brilliant day

.

.

The wind, one brilliant day, called 

to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine, 

I'd like all the odor of your roses."

.

"I have no roses; all the flowers 

in my garden are dead." 

.

"Well then, I'll take the withered petals 

and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

.

The wind left. And I wept. And I said 

"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you ?"

.

~ Antonio Machado

(translated by Robert Bly)

.

Spell to Be Said upon Departure

What was come here to do

having finished,

shelves of the water lie flat.

Copper the leaves of the doorsill,

yellow and falling.

Scarlet the bird that is singing.

Vanished the labor, here walls are.

Completed the asking.

Loosing the birds there is water.

Having eaten the pears.

Having eaten

the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.

Table be strewn.

Table be strewn with stems,

table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.

Table be strewn with pleasure,

what was here to be done having finished.

~ Jane Hirshfield

(from: The Lives of the Heart)

The Moor

It was like a church to me.

I entered it on soft foot,

Breath held like a cap in the hand.

It was quiet.

What God was there made himself felt,

Not listened to, in clean colours

That brought a moistening of the eye,

In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness

Of the heart's passions -- that was praise

Enough; and the mind's cession

Of its kingdom. I walked on,

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

~ R. S. Thomas

art by: roger jardine

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken

.

.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

.

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

.

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(Rilke’s Book of Hours:Love Poems to God, 

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

To Hear the Falling World

Only if I move my arm a certain way,

it comes back.

Or the way the light bends in the trees

this time of year,

so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.

I carry this in my body, seed

in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.

But they guard me, these small pains,

from growing sure

of myself and perhaps forgetting.

~ Jane Hirshfield

(Of Gravity & Angel)

A Blessing for Equilibrium

.

.

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,

May the music of laughter break through your soul.

.

As the wind wants to make everything dance,

May your gravity be lightened by grace.

.

Like the freedom of the monastery bell,

May clarity of mind make your eyes smile.

.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,

So free may you be about who you become.

.

As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,

May a sense of irony give you perspective.

.

As time remains free of all that it frames,

May fear or worry never put you in chains.

.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough

To hear in the distance the laughter of God.

.

~  John O'Donohue

(Benedictus - A Book of Blessings)