people like us

There are more like us. All over the world

There are confused people, who can't remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's

All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man

Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,

And hear great poems lovingly spoken 

By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you're safe.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

.

Our hearts irrigate this earth

.

How is it they live for eons in such harmony -

the billions of stars -

when most men can barely go a minute

without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.

There are wars where no one marches with a flag,

though that does not keep casualties

from mounting.

Our hearts irrigate this earth.

We are fields before

each other.

How can we live in harmony?

First we need to

know

we are all madly in love

with the same

God.

~ St. Thomas Aquinas

(Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West 

by Daniel Ladinsky)

a somebody?

About a decade after he made his oft-quoted proclamation in Leaves of Grass — 

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, 

/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

 

 — Whitman considers the cohesion of those multitudes:

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, 

independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.

 

This is the thought of identity — yours for you, whoever you are, 

as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual

 and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact,

 and only entrance to all facts. 

 

In such devout hours,

 in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, 

(significant only because of the Me in the centre,)

 creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account 

before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision,

 it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable,

 once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth,

 and spreads to the roof of heaven.

~ Walt Whitman

 from the essay Democratic Vistas
Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

with thanks to Brain Pickings