Stafford

A flavor like wild honey begins

when you cross the river. On a sandbar

sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it

a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and so bold?

You forget about gold. You stare—and a flavor

is rising all the time from the trees.

Back from the river, over by a thick

forest, you feel the tide of wild honey

flooding your plans, flooding the hours

till they waver forward looking back. They can’t

return; that river divides more than

two sides of your life. The only way

is farther, breathing that country, becoming

wise in its flavor, a native of the sun

William Stafford

from The Way it Is: New and Selected Poems

Hafiz, again

This

Sky

Where we live

Is no place to lose your wings

So love, love

Love.

Watch this, too. So, so beautiful.

Walt

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward . . . and nothing collapses

***

I swear I see now that every thing has an eternal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground. . .the weeds of the sea have. . .the animals.

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!

-Walt Whitman, excerpts from Leaves of Grass

Hafiz

Just sit there right now
Don't do a thing
Just rest.

For your separation from God,
From love,

Is the hardest work
In this World.

(excerpt from "A Cushion for Your Head", The Gift by Hafiz)

"Go out into your heart. . . "

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke's Book of Hours
(Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Pablo

"It is born"

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

-Pablo Neruda

May What I Do Flow From Me

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back. . .

Then, in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing to you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Mr. Owen

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

-Wilfred Owen
(excerpt from "Strange Meeting")

I worked in the library all four years of college. It was the first job I had ever had, and even though I was young and probably not the most ideal employee, it remains my favorite job still. I was in college just as the Internet was coming into being, so there was still a nice piece of time when people still did actual research with books. When out and about in town, I got used to people looking at me and cocking their head sideways a bit, wondering where they knew me from. "Oh, you're the Library Girl" they would say. It always made me smile.

When I was shelving books, I always had the habit of reading the first and the last sentence of a book. Sometimes, they were funny as hell. Sometimes dull, too. It was in one of the books I put away that I first came across Wilfred Owen. There is something in his talk of war that speaks to me.

Rumi

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-Rumi

Every day I put on this bracelet, arming myself with Rumi's words.

I dig for you like treasure

In deep nights I dig for you like treasure.
For all I have seen
that clutters the surface of my world
is poor and paltry substitute
for the beauty of you
that has not happened yet. . .

-Rilke

I'm working my way slowly through his Book of Hours because they cannot be consumed so wholly. So many of his words are followed by a resonating "Yes!" in my mind.

Rilke

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.


-Rainer Maria Rilke

Mark Strand

The Coming of Light
by Mark Strand


Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.

There are so many words and poems lately to which all I can say is "yes! yes! yes! Exactly!"
this is one of them.

Charles Wright, Again

I am really loving his stuff. Thought I would share another snippet:

"There is a desperation for unknown things, a thirst
For endlessness that snakes through our bones..."

-Charles Wright, Scar Tissue

All Truths

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

-Walt Whitman

Arterial Light

Lift up that far corner of landscape,
there, toward the west.
Let some of the deep light in, the arterial kind.

-Charles Wright