Monday, October 28, 2013

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





Friday, October 25, 2013

a letter from Fred









nothing arrived







~ Villagers

with thanks to endwell road



Monday, October 21, 2013

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 GedÅ‘, Ilka

Sunday, October 20, 2013

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

Sunday, October 13, 2013

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




Saturday, October 5, 2013

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



Friday, October 4, 2013

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



Thursday, September 19, 2013

opening the heart through ecstatic poetry







~ Rumi
with Coleman Barks and David Darling


Friday, September 6, 2013

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
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

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



Thursday, August 29, 2013

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