things

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

~ Lisel Mueller

 from Alive Together

with thanks to writers almanac

As she told Karen DeBrulye Cruz, “I write a lot of poems that have tension between what is going on now in society and what has always been there. My poems are much concerned with history. The message is obvious. My family went through terrible times. In Europe no one has had a private life not affected by history. I'm constantly aware of how privileged we (Americans) are.”

notes from poetry foundation

a letter from Fred

form Endwell Road

nothing arrived

~ Villagers

with thanks to endwell road

the unknown self

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye's affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind,

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discrete glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic

That knows you to your roots,

Always awaiting your deeper befriending

To take you beyond the threshold of want,

Where all your diverse strainings

Can come to wholesome ease.

~ John O'Donohue

art by Gedő, Ilka

to Holderlin

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most

intimate.  From images that are full, the spirit

plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled;

there are no lakes till eternity.  Here,

falling is best.  To fall from the mastered emotion 

into the guessed-at, and onward.

To you, O majestic poet, to you the compelling image,

O caster of spells, was a life, entire;  when you uttered it

a line snapped shut like fate,  there was a death

even in the mildest, and you walked straight into it; but

the god who preceded you led you out and beyond it.

O wandering spirit, most wandering of all!  How snugly

the others live in their heated poems and stay,

content, in their narrow smiles.  Taking part.  Only you 

move like the moon.  And underneath brightens and darkens

the nocturnal landscape, the holy, the terrified landscape,

which you feel in departures.  No one

gave it away more sublimely, gave it back

more fully to the universe, without any need to hold on.

Thus for years that you no longer counted, holy, you played

with infinite joy, as though it were not inside you,

but lay, belonging to no one, all around

on the gentle lawns of the earth, where the godlike children had left it.

Ah, what the greatest have longed for: you built it, free of desire,

stone upon stone, till it stood.  And when it collapsed,

even then you weren't bewildered.

Why, after such an eternal life, do we still

mistrust the earthly?  Instead of patiently learning from transience

the emotions for what future

slopes of the heart, in pure space?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems

translated by Stephen Mitchell

surprised by evening

There is unknown dust that is near us 

Waves breaking on shores just over the hill 

Trees full of birds that we have never seen 

Nets drawn with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there 

It has come through the nets of the stars 

Through the tissues of the grass 

Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.

The day shall never end we think:

We have hair that seemed born for the daylight;

But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise 

And our skin shall see far off as it does under water.

~ Robert Bly

the gate of heaven is everywhere

~ Cynthia Bourgeault

Sophia in Nature - Robert Bly interviewed by Roar Bjonnes

Roar Bjonnes is editor of Prout Journal.The nature of the discourse is in poetic terms.

Bly: According to the Gnostic religion, Sophia looked down upon this planet of ours and decided to descend into it. She entered inside the stones, the trees, the birds, and the water. She went into fire and air. This is the story of Sophia.

Bjonnes: This reminds me of the Tantric concept of Shakti.

Bly: Yes, exactly. Sophia--like Shakti--is an active, powerful force, all-encompassing and all-pervading energy in nature. 

Bly: The ecology movement, then, is a response to the inability of the capitalist world to understand that Sophia is also in the rain-forest  Through the loss of the story of Sophia, the Christian Church has given permission to the capitalists to destroy nature. This was done partly by translating the word "Sophia" as "wisdom". This destroys the story and takes away the feminine quality. There have been many such errors in translating the Old Testament, and we are suffering from those mistakes today.

unharvested

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.

And come to leave the routine road

And look for what had made me stall,

There sure enough was an apple tree

That had eased itself of its summer load,

And of all but its trivial foliage free,

Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.

For there had been an apple fall

As complete as the apple had given man.

The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!

May much stay out of our stated plan,

Apples or something forgotten and left,

So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

~ Robert Frost

from The Collected Poems

found at writers almanac

see ourselves as we are

Relationship is the mirror in which we can see ourselves as we are. All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other. Even the hermit, a man who goes off to a lonely spot, is related to the past, is related to those who are around him. There is no escape from relationship. In that relationship which is the mirror in which we can see ourselves, we can discover what we are, our reactions, our prejudices, our fears, depression, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow, pain, grief. We can also discover whether we love or there is no such thing as love. 

J. Krishnamurti

from Mind Without Measure

opening the heart through ecstatic poetry

~ Rumi

with Coleman Barks and David Darling

fear

At the root of all war is fear, not so much the fear men have of one another
as the fear they have of everything. It is not merely that they do not trust one another.
They do not even trust themselves.... They cannot trust anything because
they have ceased to know God.

It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this that makes us see our own evil in others

and unable to see it in ourselves....

As if this were not enough, we make the situation much worse
by artificially intensifying our sense of evil, and by increasing our propensity
to feel guilt even for things that are not in themselves wrong. In all these ways,
we build up such an obsession with evil, both in ourselves and in others,
that we waste all our mental energy trying to account for this evil, to punish it,
to exorcise it, or to get rid of it in any way we can.




~ Thomas Merton
excerpt from his 1962 essay: The Root of War is Fear

 

 

 

 

one sand grain among the others in winter wind

I wake with my hand held over the place of grief in my body.

"Depend on nothing," the voice advises, but even that is useless.

My ears are useless, my familiar and intimate tongue.

My protecting hand is useless, that wants to hold the single leaf to the tree

and say, Not this one, this one will be saved.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

peace

Perhaps peace is not, after all, something you work for,

or "fight for."  It is indeed "fighting for peace" that starts all 

the wars.  What, after all, are the pretexts of all these Cold

War crisis, but "fighting for peace"?  Peace is something you have

or do not have.  If you are yourself at peace, then there is at least 

some peace in the world.  Then share your peace with everyone,

and everyone will be at peace.  Of course I realize that arguments

 like this can be used as a pretext for passivity, for indifferent 

acceptance of every iniquity.  Quietism leads to war as surely as 

anything does.  But I am not speaking of quietism, because quietism 

is not peace, nor is it the way to peace.

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

how

Pardon all runners,

All speechless, alien winds,

All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,

Their wild attitudes,

Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on

How can it be spoken.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton