it was like this

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness -

between you, there is nothing to forgive -

but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

~ Jane Hirshfield

it takes so long

My hand remembers stroking a sleek bird years ago, 

one which was crouching under my fingers, 

longing for the sky roof on top of the cabin roof, 

the forgiveness high in the air.  

As for me, I have given so many hours to the ecstasy of detail, 

the shadow of the closing door, 

the final syllable of that poem which is already gone, 

looking back over its shoulder.  

Well, well... sometimes in our slow hours a child climbs down into this world.

~ Robert Bly

from Reaching Out to the World -
 New & Selected Prose Poems

the one who knows

~ Jack Kornfield

on the death of his child

Dew Evaporates
And all our world

 is dew...so dear,
So fresh....so fleeting



~  Issa

  from Japanese Haiku
 translation by Peter Beilenson

 

 

 

 

back into the reedbed

Time to ignore sensible advice,

to untie the knots our culture ties us with.

Cut to the quick.

Put cotton in both sentimental ears.

Go back into the reedbed.

Let cane sugar rise again in you.

No rules or daily duties.

Those do not bring the peace of silence.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

from Rumi - The Big Red Book

heart mind

~ Ram Dass

joy

~ Ram Dass

the madman

.

You ask me how I became a madman.  It happened thus:  
One day, long before many gods were born,  I woke from a deep sleep
 and found all my masks were stolen, - the seven masks I have fashioned
 and worn in seven lives, - I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting,
 "Thieves, thieves, and cursed thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried,
 "He is a madman."  I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time.  For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more.  And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness;  
the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood,
 for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. 
 Even a Thief in jail is safe from another thief.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Madman his Parables and Poems

art Ludwig Kirchner

who am I

~ Jack Kornfield

 

still

.

I said I will find what is lowly

and put the roots of my identity

down there:

each day I'll wake up

and find the lowly nearby,

a handy focus and reminder,

a ready measure of my significance,

the voice by which I would be heard,

the wills, the kinds of selfishness

I could

freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,

I can find nothing

to give myself to:

everything is

magnificent with existence, is in

surfeit of glory:

nothing is diminished,

nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:

ah, underneath,

a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:

I looked at it closely

and said this can be my habitat: but

nestling in I

found

below the brown exterior

green mechanisms beyond the intellect

awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:

I found a beggar:

he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying

him any attention: everybody went on by:

I nestled in and found his life:

there, love shook his body like a devastation:

I said

though I have looked everywhere

I can find nothing lowly

in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,

transfigurations of size and shape and place:

.

at one sudden point came still,

stood in wonder:

moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent

with being!

~ A. R. Ammons

.

emptiness

~ Jack Kornfield

 

a hundred roots silently drinking

I have many brothers in the South

who move, handsome in their vestments,

through cloister gardens.

The Madonnas they make are so human,

and I dream often of their Titians,

where God becomes an ardent flame.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself -

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Monastic Life, I,3

.

patience

~ Jack Kornfield

 

song in the year of catastrophe

I began to be followed by a voice saying:

"It can't last.  It can't last.

Harden yourself.  Harden yourself.

Be ready.  Be ready."

"Go look under the leaves,"

it said, "for what is living there

is dead in your tongue."

And it said, "Put your hands

into the earth.  Live close

to the ground. Learn the darkness.

Gather round you all

the things that you love, name

their names, prepare

to lose them,  It will be

as if all you know were turned

around within your body."

And I went and put my hands 

into the ground, and they took root

and grew into a season's harvest.

I looked behind the veil

of the leaves, and heard voices

that I knew had been dead

in my tongue years before my birth.

I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me. 

Waking in the early mornings,

I could hear it, like a bird

bemused among the leaves,

a mockingbird idly singing

in the autumn of catastrophe:

"Be ready.   Be ready.

Harden yourself.  Harden yourself."

And I heard the sound 

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

"Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?"

and the voices answering:

"Slavery!  Slavery!"

And I was afraid, loving 

what I know would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:

"you have not yet come close enough.

Come nearer the ground.  Learn

from the woodcock in the woods

whose feathering is a ritual

of the fallen leaves,

and from the nesting quail

whose speckling makes her hard to see

in the long grass.

Study the coat of the mole.

For the farmer shall wear

the greenery and the furrows

of his fields, and bear

the long standing of the woods."

And I asked: "you mean a death, then?"

"yes," the voice said.  "Die

into what the earth requires of you."

Then let go all holds, and sank

like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

and at last came fully into the ease

and the joy of that place,

all my lost ones returning.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

art by Roderick Maclver

still a mystery

How something is made flesh

no one can say. The buffalo soup

becomes a woman

who sings every day to her horses

or summons another to her private body

saying, come, touch, this is how

it begins, the path of a newly born

who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,

will grow to become a woman, a man,

with a heart that never rests,

and the gathered berries,

the wild grapes

enter the body,

human wine

which can love,

where nothing created is wasted;

the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams

of another night,

the deer meat becomes hands

strong enough to work.

But I love most

the white-haired creature

eating green leaves;

the sun shines there

swallowed, showing in her face

taking in all the light,

and in the end

when the shadow from the ground

enters the body and remains,

in the end, you might say,

This is myself,

still unknown, still a mystery.

–Linda Hogan

from Rounding the Human Corners