Sunday, June 13, 2010

Ernest-Hyde




.


My mind was a mirror:
It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
In youth my mind was just a mirror
In a rapidly flying car,
Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
Then in time
Great scratches were made on the mirror,
Letting the outside world come in,
And letting my inner self look out.
For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image —
And this is the silence of wisdom.



Edgar Lee Masters, (1868-1950)
(Spoon River Anthology)




Another Night in the Ruins




.
.
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
.
~ Galway Kinnell
(A New Selected Poems)
.

I Follow Barefoot




.
.
I long for You so much
I follow barefoot Your frozen tracks
.
That are high in the mountains
That I know are years old.
.
I long for You so much
I have even begun to travel
Where I have never been before.
.
Hafiz, there is no one in this world
Who is not looking for God.
.
Everyone is trudging along
With as much dignity, courage
And style
.
As they possibly
Can.
.
~ Hafiz
(The Subject Tonight Is Love, version by Daniel Ladinsky)
..

Forest Lake


.
.
I was alone on a sunny shore
by the forest's pale blue lake,
in the sky floated a single cloud
and on the water a single isle.
The ripe sweetness of summer dripped
in beads from every tree
and straight into my opened heart
a tiny drop ran down.
.
~ Edith Sodergran
(translated by: Stina Katchadourian)
.

On foot


.

On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air, 
to other reckless hearts.


~ Edith Sodergran, (1892-1923)
(translated by: Stina Katchadourian)

The Rose


.
.
The treasure at the heart of the rose
is your own heart's treasure.
Scatter it as the rose does:
your pain becomes hers to measure.
.
Scatter it in a song,
or in one great love's desire.
Do not resist the rose
lest you burn in its fire.
.
~ Gabriela Mistral
(translated by: Langston Hughes)
.
art by Betty Jansma
.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

What the Heart Wants






See then
what the heart wants,
that pliable iron
sprung to the poppy's redness,
the honey's gold, winged
as the heron-lit water is:
by reflecting.
As an aged elephant answers
the slightest, first gesture of hand,
it puts itself at the mercy --
utterly docile, the forces
that brought it there vanished,
fold into fold.
And the old-ice ivory, the unstartlable
black of the eye that has traveled so far
with the fringed, peripheral howdah
swaying behind, look mildly back
as it swings the whole bulk of the body
close to the ground. Over and over
it does this, bends to what asks.
Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.



~ Jane Hirshfield
(The October Palace)



The birds don't alter space




.
.
The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We're the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?
.
~ Li-Young Lee
(from:  Book of My Nights)

The Book of Time (excerpt)




.
.
I rose this morning early as usual, and went to my desk.
But it's spring,
and the thrush is in the woods,
somewhere in the twirled branches, and he is singing.
And so, now, I am standing by the open door.
And now I am stepping down into the grass.
I am touching a few leaves.
I am noticing the way the yellow butterflies
move together, in a twinkling cloud, over the field.
And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.
Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.
.
~ Mary Oliver
(from: The Leaf and the Cloud)
.

Friday, June 11, 2010

The Wish to Be Generous




.
.
All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
.
~ Wendell Berry
.
(The Collected Poems, 1957-1982)
.

for the shop






He wrapped them up carefully, neatly,
in expensive green silk.
Roses of rubies, lilies of pearl,
violets of amethyst: according to his taste, his will,
his vision of their beauty - not as he saw them in nature
or studied them. He'll heave them in the safe,
examples of his bold, his skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the shop,
he brings out other things to sell - first class ornaments:
bracelets, chains, necklaces, rings.





~ Constantine Cavafy
(translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)


hIdden things


.





From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there distorting
the actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I'd begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing -
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn't worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.






~ Constantine Cavafy
(translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
Cavafy's Painting by Karavia







.


Anyone who has probed the inner life




.





Anyone who has probed the inner life, 
who has sat in silence long enough to experience 
the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise,
is faced with a mystery. 

Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, 
there exists at the center of human consciousness 
something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself,
a beauty without features. 

The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist - 
an outer world and the mystery of the inner world -
but that we are suspended between them, 
as a space in which both worlds meet . . . 
as if the human being is the meeting point, 
the threshold between two worlds.







~ Kabir Helmisnski, 
The Knowing Heart



Thursday, June 10, 2010

Love the earth





.
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)
.

Pocket of Fog





In the yard next door,
a pocket of fog like a small heard of bison
swallows azaleas, koi pond, the red-and-gold koi.

To be undivided must mean not knowing you are.

The fog grazes here, then there,
all morning browsing the shallows,
leaving no footprint between my fate and the mountain's.




~ Jane Hirshfield, 
(After)
photo by Kathleen Connally