when we are weak

 

 

 

When we are weak, we are

strong.  When our eyes close

on the world, then somewhere

within us the bush

burns.  When we are poor

and aware of the inadequacy

of our table, it is to that 

uninvited the guest comes.

 

 

 

 

~ R. S. Thomas

art by Picasso

when they sleep

 

 

All people are children when they sleep.

there's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.

 
-- God, teach me the language of sleep.

 

 

 

 

~ Rolf Jacobsen

from Night Music - Selected Poems

translation by Robert Hedin 

photo - children of the boat people

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

ask anything

"Ask anything,"

My Lord said to me.

And my mind and heart thought deeply 

for a second,

then replied with just one word,

"When?"

God's arms then opened up and I entered Myself.

I entered Myself when I entered

Christ.

And having learned compassion I

allowed my soul

to stay.

~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

 from for lovers of god everywhere -

Poems of the Christian Mystics 

the half-finished heaven

Cowardice breaks off on its path.

Anguish breaks off on its path.

The vulture breaks off in its flight.

The eager light runs into the open,

even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see the air,

red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything starts to look around.

We go out in the sun by hundreds.

Every person is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

The endless field under us.

Water glitters between the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from Half-Finished Heaven

translated by robert bly

art by rolf harris

happiness writes white

I am a piece of chalk

scrawling words on an empty blackboard.

I am a banner of smoke

that crosses the blue air and doesn't dissolve.

I don't believe that only sorrow

and misery can be written.

Happiness, too, can be precise:

Doctor, there's a keen throbbing

on the left side of my chest

where my ribs are wrenched by joy.

Wings flutter in my shoulders

and blood courses through my body

like waves cresting on a choppy sea.

Look: the eyes blur with tears

and the tears clear.

My head is like skylight.

My heart is like dawn.

~ Edward Hirsch

from Special Orders

thanks to knopf  poetry

broken

In my loneliness

I break and burn

twigs for the snapping fire -

hoping the smoke at least won't leave.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

translation by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

for what binds us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down --

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses, 

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other 

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

~ Jane Hirshfield

(Of Gravity & Angels)

exhausted

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,

Time takes on the strain until it breaks;

Then all the unattended stress falls in

On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.

Things you could take in your stride before

Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.

Gravity begins falling inside you,

Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.

And you are marooned on unsure ground.

Something within you has closed down;

And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.

The desire that drove you has relinquished.

There is nothing else to do now but rest

And patiently learn to receive the self

You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken

And sadness take over like listless weather.

The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.

Learn to linger around someone of ease

Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,

Having learned a new respect for your heart

And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

art by van gogh

indescribable vastness

Indescribable vastness,

streaming from all sides,

streaming from no sides,

an ocean full and overflowing

with a luminous nothing.

...

where no word has ever gone, but

out of which the Word emerges.

And so this Silence washes

into the shores of perception,

making it stretch to receive

in metaphors of light,

union, calm,

spaciousness.

...

You are the vastness 

into which you gaze.

"Deep calls unto deep in the 

roar of your waters" (Ps 42:7)

~ Martin Laird
from for lovers of god everywhere

NASA photo of star cluster NGC 602


 

immersion

There is anger abroad in the world, a numb thunder,

because of God's silence. But how naive,

to keep wanting words we could speak ourselves,

English, Urdu, Tagalog, the French of Tours,

the French of Haiti...

Yes, that was one way omnipotence chose

to address us - Hebrew, Aramaic, or whatever the patriarchs

chose in their turn to call what they heard. Moses

demanded the word, spoken and written. But perfect freedom

assured other ways of speech. God is surely

patiently trying to immerse us in a different language,

events of grace, horrifying scrolls of history

and the unearned retrieval of blessings lost for ever,

the poor grass returning after drought, timid, persistent.

God's abstention is only from human dialects. The holy voice

utters its woe and glory in myriad musics, in signs and portents.

Our own words are for us to speak, a way to ask and to answer.

~ Denise Levertov

from for lovers of god everywhere
Poems of the Christian Mystics
art by Hillal Hussain

 

 

 

funny

What’s it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful

being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat

breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly

it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes

eating bread
while filling up on hunger

it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death

That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air

—Anna Kamienska 

from Astonishments 

translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon

with thanks to love is a place

before sorrow

 

 

Before sorrow, anger,

longing, or fear have arisen,

you are in the center.

 

When these emotions appear

and you know how to see through them,

you are in harmony.

 

That center is the root of the universe;

that harmony is the Tao,

which reaches out to all things.

 

 

 

 

~ Stephen Mitchell

 from The Second Book of the Tao

 

 

 

a problem thought cannot resolve

The self is a problem that thought cannot resolve. 

There must be an awareness which is not of thought. 

To be aware, without condemnation or justification, of the activities of the self - 

just to be aware - is sufficient. 

If you are aware in order to find out how to resolve the problem, 

in order to transform it, in order to produce a result, 

then it is still within the field of the self, of the 'me'. 

So long as we are seeking a result, whether through analysis, 

through awareness, through constant examination of every thought, 

we are still within the field of thought, 

which is within the field of the 'me', of the 'I', of the ego, or what you will. 

As long as the activity of the mind exists, surely there can be no love. 

When there is love, we shall have no social problems.

~ J. Krishnamurti

with thanks to j. krishnamurti online

letter to a young activist

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually as you struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell you the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them, but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your even thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come, not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

~ Thomas Merton

suchness

In the theosophy of light,

The logical universal

Ceases to be anything more

Than the dead body of an angel.

What is substance? Our substance

Is whatever we feed our angel.

The perfect incense for worship

Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes.

~ Kenneth Rexroth

from Selected Poems