soul of the world

~ Rumi 
version and reading by Coleman Barks 

summoned

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating planations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

I felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke free on the open sky.

~ Pablo Neruda

version by Anthony Kerrigan

from Selected Poems

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

no place

Where you come from is gone, 

where you thought you were going to was never there, 

and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. 

Where is there a place for you to be? 

No place. 

Nothing outside you can give you any place. 

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

You needn't look at the sky because 

it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. 

You needn't search for any hole in the ground 

to look through into somewhere else. 

You can't go neither forwards nor backwards 

into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. 

In yourself right now is all the place you've got. 

If there was any Fall, look there, 

if there was any Redemption, look there, 

and if you expect any Judgment, look there, 

because they all three will have to be in your time 

and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

~ Flannery O'Connor

from Wise Blood

art by georgia okeeffe

with thanks to whiskeyriver

the first elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart:  I would be consumed 

in that overwhelming existence.  For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note

of my dark sobbing.  Ah, whom can we ever turn to

in our need?  Not angels, not humans,

and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in

our interpreted world.  Perhaps there remains for us

some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take 

into our vision;  there remains for us yesterday's street

and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease

when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

Oh and night:  there is night, when a wind full of infinite space 

gnaws at our faces.  Whom would it not remain for - that longed-after,

mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart

so painfully meets.  Is it any less difficult for lovers?

But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

Don't you know yet?   Fling the emptiness out of your arms 

into the spaces we breathe;  perhaps the birds

will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes - the springtimes needed you.  Often a star

was waiting for you to notice it.  A wave rolled toward you

out of the distant past, or as you walked

under an open window, a violin

yielded itself to your hearing.  All this was mission.

But could you accomplish it?  Weren't you always

distracted by expectation, as if every event

announced a beloved?  (Where can you find a place

to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you

going and coming and often staying all night.)

But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;

for their famous passion is still not immortal.  Sing

of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)

who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.

Begin again and again the never-attainable praising;

remember:  the hero lives on; even his downfall was

merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.

But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back

into herself, as if there were not enough strength

to create them a second time.  Have you imagined

Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl

deserted by her beloved might be inspired

by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love

and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"?

Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow

more fruitful for us?  Isn't it time that we lovingly

freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:

as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that 

gathered in the snap of release it can be more than

itself.  For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices.  Voices.  Listen, my heart, as only

saints have listened:  until the gigantic call lifted them

off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,

kneeling and didn't notice at all:

so complete was their listening.  Not that you could endure

God's voice - far from it.  But listen to the voice of the wind

and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.

Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church

in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you?

Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,

as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.

What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance

of injustice about their death - which at times

slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn,

not to see roses and other promising Things

in terms of a human future; no longer to be 

what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave 

even one's own first name behind, forgetting it

as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

Strange to no longer desire one's desires.  Strange

to see meanings that clung together once, floating away

in every direction.  And being dead is hard work

and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel

a trace of eternity. - Though the living are wrong to believe

in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.

Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living 

they are moving among, or the dead.  The eternal torrent

whirls all ages along in it, through both realms

forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:

they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children 

outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.  But we, who do need

such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often

the source of our spirit's growth -: could we exist without them?

Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,

the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;

and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god

had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time

that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from the  Duino Elegies

translation by Stephen Mitchell

I am in love...I'm ready...

~ Terry Gross and Maurice Sendak

with thanks to erin w

in my beginning is my end

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older 

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated 

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment 

Isolated, with no before and after, 

But a lifetime burning in every moment 

And not the lifetime of one man only 

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. 

There is a time for the evening under starlight, 

A time for the evening under lamplight 

(The evening with the photograph album). 

Love is most nearly itself 

When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers 

Here or there does not matter 

We must be still and still moving 

Into another intensity 

For a further union, a deeper communion 

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, 

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters 

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~  Thomas Sterns Eliot

from Four Quartets, East Coker

I have daughters and I have sons

1

Who is out there at six a.m.?  The man

Throwing newspapers onto the porch,

And the roaming souls suddenly

Drawn down into their sleeping bodies.

2

Wild words of Jacob Bohme

Go on praising the human body,

But heavy words of the ascetics 

Sway in the fall gales.

3

Do I have a right to my poems?

To my jokes? To my loves?

Oh foolish man, knowing nothing -

Less than nothing - about desire.

4

I have daughters and I have sons.

When one of them lays a hand 

On my shoulder, shining fish

Turn suddenly in the deep sea.

5

At this age, I especially love dawn

On the sea, stars above the trees,

Pages in The Threefold Life,

And the pale faces of baby mice.

6

Perhaps our life is made of struts

And paper, like those early

Wright Brothers planes.  Neighbors

Run along holding the wingtips.

7

I do love Yeats's fierceness

As he jumped into a poem,

And that lovely calm in my father's

Hands, as he buttoned his coat.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

circus animals

Bears are stomping in perfect time.

A lion jumps through flaming hoops.

A whip cracks and the music grinds.

A monkey rides a bike in a yellow suit.

A whip cracks and the animals turn their glance.

Dogs dance in carefully measured movements.

An elephant walks with a pitcher in perfect balance.

Myself, I'm quite embarrassed, I, a human.

People didn't enjoy themselves that day.

You wouldn't know it from the clapping hands

though one hand elongated by a whip

cast a striking shadow on the sand.

~Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translation by Joanna Trzeciak

the end and the beginning

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired 

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs, 

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years,

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about 

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

 sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here 

must make way for 

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translation by Joanna Trzeciak

the frogs after dark

I am so much in love with mournful music

That I don't bother to look for violinists.

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet.

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Bears are often piled up close to each other.

In caves of bears, it's just one hump

After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

You and I have spent so many hours working.

We have paid dearly for the life we have.

It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,

And the singer urging the low notes to come.

We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

There is some slowness in life that is right for us.

But we love to remember the way the soul leaps

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the ear of a Donkey

coursera

~ Daphne Koller

co-creator of Coursera

childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before

you try to find words for something so lost,

for those long childhood afternoons you knew

that vanished so completely - and why?

We're still reminded - : sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us

except what happens to things and creatures:

we lived their world as something human,

and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd

and as overburdened by vast distances,

and summoned and stirred as from far away,

and slowly, like a long new thread,

introduced into that picture-sequence

where now having to go on bewilders us. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

photo by kathleen connally

every atom babbles the mystery

Love plays its lute behind the screen -

where is a lover to listen to its tune?

With every breath a new song,

each split second a new string plucked.

The world has spilled Love's secret -

when could music ever hold its tongue?

Every atom babbles the mystery -

Listen yourself, for I'm no tattletale!

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

from Divine Flashes 

translation by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson

art by van gogh

a christmas poem

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all agree

To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;

All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place

As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late

At night, when a trapper who has been caught

In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man

With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—

Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve

Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often 

Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women

Who had died in wars started by others,

Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree

Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we

Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er 

The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not

Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

two water-sellers

A man who lived by selling water found

He'd very little left; he looked around

And saw another water-seller there -

"Have you got any water you could spare?"

He asked.  "No, fool, I certainly have not,"

The other snapped; "make do with what you've got!"

"Oh, give me some," the man began to plead;

"I'm sick of what I have; it's yours I need."

When Adam's heart grew tired of all he knew,

He yearned for wheat, a substance strange and new -

He gave up all he owned for one small grain,

And naked suffered love's relentless pain;

He disappeared in love's intensity -

The old and new were gone and so was he;

He was annihilated, lost, made naught -

Nothingness swallowed all his hands had sought.

To turn from what we are, to yearn and die

Is not for us to choose or to deny."

~ Farid Attar

from The Conference of Birds

art by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez