Wednesday, November 9, 2011

too simple for words







truth is too simple for words
before thought gets tangled up in nouns and 
verbs
there is a wordless sound
a deep breathless sigh
of overwhelming relief
to find the end of fiction
in this ordinary
yet extraordinary moment
when words are recognized
as words
and truth is recognized
as everything else




~ Nirmala
with thanks to poetry chaikhana
Nirmala is a contemporary spiritual teacher in the nondualist Advaita tradition. 
He traces his spiritual lineage through Neelam and H.W.L. Poonja to Ramana Maharshi.


love of the wind





.

We've spent a lot of time keeping some old men alive. 
I don’t’ think you should criticize us for that. 
Even old sailors keep their love of the wind. 

We know so little of our neighbor’s sorrow. 
He never told us what happened to his son. 
What can it mean that Jesus had no sister? 

We’ll never know anything better than a dog. 
It doesn't matter how deeply he sleeps. 
The sleeping dog leaves all the world for the floor. 

It’s all right if the family gathers together at night 
And sings like sailors when the wind rises. 
The roof of the house will last the night. 

I've never been an old friend to the wind. 
Don’t expect me to be happy about haystacks 
Scattered in a storm or blown-down barns. 

Don’t expect me to talk about the Spanish armada 
Getting into trouble off the Galway coast. 
Even old sailors keep their love of the wind.






~ Robert Bly
art by van gogh




Tuesday, November 8, 2011

carmel point








The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly, It has all time, It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.  Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident 
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.






~ Robinson Jeffers
art by Gordon Mortensen



Saturday, November 5, 2011

790








Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,
Impatient of no Child —
The feeblest — or the waywardest —
Her Admonition mild —

In Forest — and the Hill —
By Traveller — be heard —
Restraining Rampant Squirrel —
Or too impetuous Bird —

How fair Her Conversation —
A Summer Afternoon —
Her Household — Her Assembly —
And when the Sun go down —

Her Voice among the Aisles
Incite the timid prayer
Of the minutest Cricket —
The most unworthy Flower —

When all the Children sleep —
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps —
Then bending from the Sky —

With infinite Affection —
And infiniter Care —
Her Golden finger on Her lip —
Wills Silence — Everywhere —






~ Emily Dickinson
with thanks to writers almanac



Friday, November 4, 2011

lost in the forest








Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
myabe it was the voice of the rain crying, 
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up though my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood -
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.









~ Pablo Neruda

.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

a thought





Some thoughts
throw off 
a backward heat
as walls might,
at night, in summer.

It could happen 
this moment -

Some movement.

One word's almost
imperceptible shiver.

And what was
long cold
in your left palm,
long cold in your right palm,
might find itself
malleable, warmer.

An apricot
could be planted
in such a corner.





~ Jane Hirshfield
from Come, Thief





Friday, October 28, 2011

not mine













All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine
And to know such pretending is disgraceful.
But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed
And started to prophesy. No one would hear me. 
Their screens and microphones are not for that. 
Others like me wander the streets
And talk to themselves. Sleep on benches in parks,
Or on pavements in alleys. For there aren't enough prisons
To lock up all the poor. I smile and keep quiet. 
They won't get me now. 
To feast with the chosen—that I do well.





~ Czeslaw Milosz 
translated by Robert Hass 
photo by Christine de Grancy






meaning







.

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. 
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset. 
The true meaning, ready to be decoded. 
What never added up will add Up, 
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended. 
- And if there is no lining to the world? 
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, 
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day 
Make no sense following each other? 
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth? 
- Even if that is so, there will remain 
A word wakened by lips that perish, 
A tireless messenger who runs and runs 
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, 
And calls out, protests, screams.




~ Czeslaw Milosz


snow-mountain







.


All my life perplexed by truth and falsity, right and wrong;
Now amusing myself in the moonlight,
Laughing at the wind,
Listening to the songs of birds --
So many years spent idly contemplating
The immense white layer on the mountains;
This winter, all of a sudden,
I see it for the first time as a snow-mountain.





~ Dogen
english version by Steven Heine
from The Zen Poetry of Dogen
with thanks to poetry chaikhana
art by Chen Jun




ladder








A man tips back his chair, all evening.

Years later, the ladder of small indentations
still marks the floor. Walking across it, then stopping.

Rarely are what is spoken and what is meant the same.

Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees
say another, the floor hears a third.

Yet within us,
objects and longings are not different.
They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes.







~ Jane Hirshfield 
from Given Sugar, Given Salt
with thanks to nexus


Wednesday, October 26, 2011

children of a full life





.




with special thanks to it's all dhamma




why do I write






I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.



~ Jane Hirshfield





Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Che Fece... Il Gran Refiuto


.


For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.




~ Constantine P. Cavafy
from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems
translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard



the falling





.


You turn towards meteor showers in August,
wishing yourself like that:
bright and burning wholly out.
When feeling finally comes it is
that falling, matter breaking away
from air, the sound
of crickets moving through the grass like fire—
and the strangely twisted metal
in the field that a child finds:
residue, crown.
Then there’s the story of the Chinese sage,
in anger and despair, who cut his body away in pieces,
flung them into the lake.
Each one, becoming finned and whole, swims off.





~ Jane Hirshfield




a lie



self-portrait - 1901



Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth

Everyone wants to understand painting. 
Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds?
 Why do they love a night, a flower, 
everything which surrounds man, 
without attempting to understand them? 
 
Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. 
Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; 
that he, too, is a minute element of the world
 to whom one should ascribe no more importance 
than so many things in nature which charm us 
but which we do not explain to ourselves.
 
 Those who attempt to explain a picture 
are on the wrong track most of the time.



~ Pablo Picasso
Boisgeloup, winter 1934