the exhibit

My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
never existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.

 ~  Lisel Mueller

from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

art: tapestry from the middle ages. Designed in Paris about 1500,
 are considered to be some of the greatest surviving masterpieces
 of medieval European art. They depict a lady flanked by a lion
 and a unicorn, surrounded by an enchanting world of animals, 
trees and flowers. One of the most intriguing aspects of these
 six large-scale artworks is the mystery of their origin and meaning.
 

with thanks to whiskey river

 

prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever

What is is is what

I want.  Only that.  But that.

~  Galway Kinnell

another night in the ruins

7

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

 from Three Books

lines written in the days of growing darkness

Every year we have been

witness to it: how the

world descends

into a rich mash, in order that

it may resume.

And therefore

who would cry out 

to the petals on the ground

to stay,

knowing, as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married 

to the vitality of what will be?

I don’t say

it’s easy, but

what else will do 

if the love one claims to have for the world

be true?

So let us go on 

though the sun be swinging east,

and the ponds be cold and black,

and the sweets of the year be doomed.

~ Mary Oliver

photo by Eliot Porter

more kind?

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”
He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,
“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.

~ Hafiz

from The Gift: Poems by the Great Sufi Master

 

cummings and chopin

~ art by e.e. cummings

the skinny birds of non-existence

~ Robert Bly

during a storm

You too are a tree. During a storm of emotions, 

you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart,

 which are like the top of the tree.

 

 You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm,

 and come back to the trunk of the tree. 

Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel.

 

 Focus there, paying attention only to the movement 

of your abdomen, and continue to breathe.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

 

 

 

 

still morning

It appears now that there is only one

age and it knows

nothing of age as the flying birds know

nothing of the air they are flying through

or of the day that bears them up

through themselves

and I am a child before there are words

arms are holding me up in a shadow

voices murmur in a shadow

as I watch one patch of sunlight moving

across the green carpet

in a building

gone long ago and all the voices

silent and each word they said in that time

silent now

while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

~ W. S. Merwin

from Collected Poems (1996 - 2011)

art by emile claus

forgiveness

Forgiveness is the answer to a child’s dream of a miracle
 by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean.
 The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive.
 In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us - we are forgiven.
 But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed
 to stand between ourselves and others.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld 

from Markings

translated by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden.

Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the United Nations, serving from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. He is the only person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. Markings, a sort of diary of poetry and meditations, was found in his office after his death, along with a letter to Swedish Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Leif Sjoberg, explaining that it may be published if Mr. Sjoberg felt it worth publishing.

from Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
 only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate;
 only love can do that. 

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world
 that we must love our enemies - or else? 
The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate,
 wars producing more wars - must be broken,
 or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love
 will have the final word in reality. This is why right,
 temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. 

I have decided to stick with love.
 Hate is too great a burden to bear. 

Love is the only force capable of transforming
 an enemy into friend. 

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.
 He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid 
of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us
 and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this,
 we are less prone to hate our enemies. 

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

my apologies

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 

 My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. 

 Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. 

 May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. 

 My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. 

 My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. 

 Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. 

 Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 

 My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. 

 My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. 

 Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. 

 Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. 

 And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, 
staring, motionless, always at the same spot, 
 absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. 

 My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. 

 My apologies to large questions for small answers. 

 Truth, do not pay me too much attention. 

 Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. 

 Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. 

 Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. 

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. 

 My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. 

 I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. 

 Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

photo by agencja gazeta

on the value of not-knowing

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power
 by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, 
and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes,
 but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them
 once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else,
 since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge
 that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain
 the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases,
 cases well known from ancient and modern history, 
it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. 
It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include 
the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth 
hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” 
the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground 
like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up 
and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie
 never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up
 teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families,
 and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.
 But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, 
not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits
 are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness 
and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering,
 of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure
 that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses
 pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun
 to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know;
 whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got 
reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short,
 bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else
 we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, 
after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally 
acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. 
Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se 
and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, 
we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary
 course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
 nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
 Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, 
not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

 ~  Wisława Szymborska

 art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

 

so much of Everything

Reality demands

we also state the following:

life goes on.

At Cannae and Borodino.

at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica.

There is a gas station 

in a small plaza in Jericho,

and freshly painted

benches near Bila Hora.

Letters travel

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a furniture truck passes

before the eyes of the lion of Chaeronea,

and only an atmospheric front advances

toward the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything,

that Nothing is quite well concealed,

Music flows

from yachts at Actium

and on board couples dance in the sun.

So much keeps happening, 

that it must be happening everywhere.

Where not a stone is left standing,

there is an ice-cream truck

besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been,

Hiroshima is again

manufacturing products

for everyday use.

Not without its draws is this terrible world,

not without its draws

worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice

the grass is green

and on the grass is - you know how grass is -

transparent dew,

Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,

those still remembered,

and those long forgotten,

birch groves and cedar groves,

snows and sands, iridescent swamps,

and ravines of dark defeat

where today, in sudden need,

you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.

But what really flows is quickly drying blood,

and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes

the wind blows hats off heads

and we cannot help-

but laugh.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

 

living in two worlds

~ Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman