Welcome to November’s Poem of the Month!

It’s been a busy month here in Seattle, and there were so many wonderful things to celebrate and be thankful for during this last month and especially this Thanksgiving weekend.

Since last month’s Poem of the Month, I accepted a position with T-Mobile as their Manager of Finance Training and Career Development. My role with TM is to develop job competencies and career paths for the 900+ employees in TM’s Finance organization. I’m very thrilled to join such a great company.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, our festivities included my kids getting to meet their “new” cousins from California, who came up with their families to celebrate Thanksgiving at Jody’s parents. It was a convening of the Kealy clan that included Brothers, Sisters, close family friends, and an Aunt and Uncle. We all hit the Seattle Thanksgiving Parade, and to round out the weekend, Jody and I were lured into attending a surprise engagement party, where we got to spend a wonderful evening surrounding by new, and old, friends.

I hope that your Thanksgiving was filled with joy, hope, and that wonderful recognition that life creates infinite things to be thankful for.

Warmest wishes,
Stewart

Starfish    
by Eleanor Lerman
(1952 -  )

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who say, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

What a wonderfully incredible month October has already been!

I began this month with my annual Port wine trip to Portugal with our For The Love of Port tour, spending four days in Oporto visiting the Port Lodges, and then travelling the 100 miles up the Douro River for four days, visiting 7 Quintas over the remaining four days. The harvest was in full swing while we were there, and there was considerable buzz not only about the 2008 harvest being picked, but also the developing quality of the 2007 vintage that has been in casks for a year. For the wine lovers and Port fans, my tally for the week was 176 wines, ranging from two 1937 colheita Ports to 2007 Ports sampled directly from the barrels, to even a few 2008 wines, whose grapes were literally crushed hours prior. Other highlights included a once-in-a-lifetime dinner at the fabled Factory House with some of the luminaries of the Port industry and being able to once again climb into the big stone lagares at Quinta do Crasto and actually do some grape-stompin’ myself. We had a great group travelling with us, and it was a very memorable return to Portugal for me.

After Portugal, my lovely girlfriend Jody met me in London, and we spent the next few days enjoying the London sights and culture. We saw “Wicked” in London’s West End, and attended another Port tasting. After a week of drinking Port, you would think that I’d be looking forward to a break, but this monumental tasting of some of the great Ports from Cockburns could not be missed. The 23 Ports on the day’s tasting agenda included Cockburns Ports from 1896, bottles from every declared vintage, 2007 cask samples, and even a bottle from the non-declared 1977 vintage, which basically doesn’t officially exist. It was provided from the private reserves of Cockburn’s winemaker, who joined us for the event from Portugal and added absolutely wonderful commentary about the wines throughout the night.

How could one top such a week and a half? A surprise trip to Venice for Jody, who thought all along that we were just going to spend “a few days in Scotland” after London. The weather was warm and perfect, the city was absolutely magical, and as the final exclamation on an unforgettable two weeks, we got engaged at dusk in the plaza of San Marco, steps from bank of Venice’s Grand Canal.

For October’s Poem of the Month, I give you a selection from the prose Poet Louis Jenkins…

Louis Jenkins
(1942 -  )

Flight

Past mishaps might be attributed to an incomplete understanding of the laws of aerodynamics or perhaps even to a more basic failure of the imagination, but were to be expected. Remember, this is solo flight unencumbered by bicycle parts, aluminum and nylon or even feathers. A tour de force, really. There’s a lot of running and flapping involved and as you get older and heavier, a lot more huffing and puffing. But on a bright day like today with a strong headwind blowing up from the sea, when, having slipped the surly bonds of common sense and knowing she is watching, waiting in breathless anticipation, you send yourself hurtling down the long, green slope to the cliffs, who knows? You might just make it.

I almost never select the same poet two months in a row, but this month’s poem by Walt Whitman was simply too perfect to pass up.
 

I’m heading out tomorrow for my annual trip to Portugal’s wine region, where I will spend a week with wine friends touring and tasting through the Douro Valley. This will be my third year visiting there during harvest, and one line from this month’s selection, “The long brown path before me” makes me recalled the rugged beauty of the rocky Portuguese vineyards seemingly far away from the rest of the world. The Douro Valley is a far cry from places like Napa or Walla Walla, mainly because there simply are not a lot of tourists, shopping, spas, or other amenities you’d fine in many other wine regions. Maybe I love it for the fact that such a place of simple ruggedness and beauty produces such amazing Ports and wines from its rocky soils. It’s a magical place, and I am looking forward to arriving there in a matter of hours.
 

Portugal will be followed by a few days in the UK, visiting friends, catching a show in the West End, attending a monumental Cockburn Port tasting reaching back to the 1890’s,  enjoying some museums and…well, since I’ve always been such an Anglophile…just taking in the sheer history of the place.
 

I hope you are all doing well, and I leave you with a selection from Walt Whitman’s Songs of the Open Road…
 

Walt Whitman
(1819 - 1892)

From Song of The Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

Since it IS the last day of July, this month’s Poem of the Month squeaks in just under the wire. As life seems to get busier and accelerate (especially during these summer months), I wanted to find a poem that would remind us to stop every now and then, just for a moment, and to simply enjoy the miracle of being…

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

Miracles    

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
      with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
      and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

Mary Oliver
(1935 - )

Poem Number 135

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and
Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the
Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled-
I’m wading along

in the sunlight-
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Welcome to May’s Poem of the Month!

Sometimes I could swear that the clocks in my house accelerate and there are really only 12 hours in each day… May has been a blur marked by birthday celebrations, six weeks of kitchen remodel (finally coming to a beautiful end - yeah!), weekends out of town, kid’s school activities, dinners with friends…

As I sat down the other day to start reading some poems in search of this month’s selection, I stumbled upon this month’s selection, and recalled a fond high school memory of driving out into the Alabama countryside with friends to hang out and listen to music on the car radio (there obviously wasn’t a lot to do for teenagers in my hometown). I remember piling out of the car into the hot evening air, and as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, the stars seemed to grow in their brightness until the sky became of dome of twinkling light. The vastness made a remarkable impression on me, and standing there, slightly stunned, I mumbled a paraphrased line to myself from H.G. Well’s “Time Machine” (here faithfully reproduced): “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.”

Hopefully this poem will provide good intellectual balance to our otherwise busy lives. Read it, and then go out tonight and take a look at the stars…

Adam Kirsch

Now that no one looking at the night

Now that no one looking at the night-
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can’t and weren’t meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.

Welcome to April’s Poem of the Month!

First, my apologies for sending out this month’s poem almost half-way through April! Life, as we all know, can get hectic and busy. In addition to Spring bursting its way onto the stage here in Seattle, this month has already seen a major project at work that has been challenging in both its scope and timeline. My family has a whole litany of birthdays and anniversaries this month (including my daughter’s birthday tomorrow and my own in a few weeks), I have a major kitchen remodel underway, and I just completed the redesigned our www.fortheloveofport.com website. To top it off, I am having to juggle getting my car’s rear window repaired after someone decided that they’d see how much change might be in the center console (I think they made off with about $0.42, an emergency car kit and little else). I actually laughed that someone went through all that effort… The window and the kit are all replaceable - they are, after all, just “things” - and I found two quarters on the sidewalk this morning, so I figure I’m $0.08 ahead now.

I sincerely appreciate you letting me share one of my passions, poetry, with you all. I have long been a lover of words, of the condensing of sentiment into those well-chosen words, those perfect phrases that capture love, or fear, or remorse, or joy and leaves it hanging there, just in front of our eyes purely for our enjoyment. Selecting a poem each month is truly a labor of love for me - it is a time every month when, no matter how busy life gets, I pause to read, to reflect, to share. Maybe it’s just my way of acknowledging and celebrating those small moments of profoundness that seem so elusive for the rest of the month. Either way, thank you for your indulgence.

Yesterday, standing in the middle of my 1942 kitchen, now stripped bare to the stud walls, I started thinking about the meals that had been cooked there, the laughs, the lives that passed through this space. I may have begun to feel a little sense regret at changing such a space, but it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t the cabinets or the tile countertops or the aging linoleum that gave this space is reverence. Kitchens and buildings and places constantly change, but it is precisely those laughs, those lives and those memories that endow those spaces with their meaning.

As if to drive the point home once and for all, as I turned from the scene, I noticed, written by my daughter’s finger in the fine layer of plaster dust that had settled on the sideboard, the words “I love you Dad”.

Wishing you “pristine beauty” in the grain of your own personal granite…

Stewart

Carmel Point
by Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop
rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine
beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. —As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Anne E. Michaels

Orion’s Belt

It is dark enough. Just.
He’s too young to watch the late night sky,
but we walk out together
past dusk, onto the cool grass,
leaves beneath our feet.
He’s wearing pajamas
under his coat. He thinks he sees
Orion’s belt, there; no, there.
It’s funny how, at first,
All stars look alike.

Our necks begin to ache,
so I lie down. Earth is cold.
I make a blanket of myself
to keep him from the chill.
His hair tickles my chin.
We find the Little Dipper first,
then the big one. The Drinking Gourd.
The Bear.

It doesn’t look like a bear, he says.
But there, those three bright stars
do make a shining belt in heaven.
His feet are cold, my muscles stiff -
we make an awkward constellation on the lawn.
He says he sees Orion’s dagger
hanging from the belt; perhpas he does,
his eyes are better than mine.
Still, there’s haze tonight
and too much glimmer from the city
and the rising moon.

I think about Orion, who cannot feel
the grass and cool leaves brush his skin or
a child’s weight upon his body.
I hold my son against myself,
against the cold, against the earth,
against the darkness.
And from this night on, the stars are different:
named, found, loved,
recognizable in their sky.

Judith Strasser

Natural Buoyancy

You were two months old
when we stood in the pool at the “Y”,
hip-deep in chlorine-heavy water
warm as a mother’s womb. We pushed
you through the ripples
coaxing, “Swim to Daddy,” “Swim
to Mommy,” trusting baby fat
and reflex to keep you afloat
and breathing properly.

Just as, when the stewardess
leads you down the jetway,
your backpack slung
over one shoulder, sporty (or
is it cool?), I picture you,
not as a shuttlecock, hurtling
toward your father through thin air
and turbulence, but more like
a kestrel, soaring, held aloft
by thermals and your natural buoyancy.

Jean de Sponde
(1557 - 1595)

Sonnets on Love XIII

“Give me a place to stand,” Archimedes said,
“and I can move the world.” Paradoxical, clever,
his remark which first explained the use of the lever
was an academic joke. But if that dead

sage could return to life, he would find a clear
demonstration of his idea, which is not
pure theory after all. That putative spot
exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.

What could be more immovable or stronger?
What becomes more and more secure, the longer
it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point
from which to move a world that is out of joint,
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.

Jane Kenyon
(1947 - 1995)

Taking Down The Tree

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant.

Timothy Steele
(1948 - )

Toward the Winter Solstice

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

C.G. Hanzlicek
(1942 - )

Mystery

The self is no mystery, the mystery is
That there is something for us to stand on.
— George Oppen

There are no guardrails at Canyon de Chelly.
On the very edge
Of the great brow of rock,
I suffered a vertigo
That tied me forever to the earth.
I want to be here,
With the oak floors creaking under me,
And outside, among the flowers,
Where the columbine
Sensibly dies back upon itself
In the first freeze.
The mysteries are all here:
Roots, the leaves turning,
The spiders hard at their geometry lessons,
The seed that obeys perfectly
Its own limits,
The worms turning among the leaves,
Turning the leaves to compost,
Dung beetle and bottle fly,
The fluting of the white crowned sparrow,
The shrill cries
Of the flickers, newly arrived,
The dog at his dreams,
The airiness of the dogwood,
The heaviness of the cork oak,
And the Bradford pear,
Burning its deepest reds like a candle flame,
And the sun, most mysterious,
Will be almost that red
Just before setting this evening.
The muddiness of the self
Can be forgiven, almost forgotten,
In the clarity of late October.

Joseph Stroud
(1943 -    )

Directions
by Joseph Stroud

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world

Take a plane to London.
From King’s Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of Nidd,
a narrow road with hight stone walls on each side,
and soon you’ll be on the moors. There’s a pub,
The Drovers, where it’s warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculiar.
For a moment everything will be all right. You’re back
at a beginning. Soon you’ll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You’ll walk for hours. You’ll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.

Steve Scafidi

Prayer for Marriage

When we are old one night and the moon
arcs over the house like an antique
China saucer and the teacup sun

follows somewhere far behind
I hope the stars deepen to a shine
so bright your could read by it

if you lilked and the sadnesses
we will have known go away
for awhile - in this hour or two

before sleep - and that we kiss
standing in the kitchen not fighting
gravity so much as embodying

its sweet force, and I hope we kiss
like we do today knowing so much
good is said in this primitive tongue

from the wild first surprising ones
to the lower dizzying ten thousand
infinitely slower ones - and I hope

while we stand there in the kitchen
making tea and kissing, the whistle
of the teapot wakes the neighbors.

Raymond Carver
(1938 - 1988)

Happiness

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

Joyce Sutphen
(1949 - )

Crossroads

The second half of my life will be black
to the white rind of the old and fading moon.
The second half of my life will be water
over the cracked floor of these desert years.
I will land on my feet this time,
knowing at least two languages and who
my friends are. I will dress for the
occasion, and my hair shall be
whatever color I please.
Everyone will go on celebrating the old
birthday, counting the years as usual,
but I will count myself new from this
inception, this imprint of my own desire.

The second half of my life will be swift,
past leaning fenceposts, a gravel shoulder,
asphalt tickets, the beckon of open road.
The second half of my life will be wide-eyed,
fingers shifting through fine sands,
arms loose at my sides, wandering feet.
There will be new dreams every night,
and the drapes will never be closed.
I will toss my string of keys into a deep
well and old letters into the grate.

The second half of my life will be ice
breaking up on the river, rain
soaking the fields, a hand
held out, a fire,
and smoke going
upward, always up.

Sara Teasdale
(1884-1933)

Those Who Love

Those who love the most,
Do not talk of their love,
Francesca, Guinevere,
Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,
In the fragrant gardens of heaven
Are silent, or speak if at all
Of fragile inconsequent things.

And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.

W.H. Auden
(1907 - 1971)

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel, Pieter, c. 1558
(Icarus in the lower right of the painting)

Mary Oliver
(1935 -   )

Spring

Somewhere
    a black bear
      has just risen from sleep
         and is staring

down the mountain.
    All night
      in the brisk and shallow restlessness
         of early spring

I think of her,
     her four black fists
      flicking the gravel,
         her tongue

like a red fire
     touching the grass,
      the cold water.
         There is only one question:

how to love this world.
    I think of her
      rising
         like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
       of the trees.
         Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
       and its music
         and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
       down the mountain,
         breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her–
    her white teeth,
       her wordlessness,
         her perfect love.

William Wordsworth

(1770 – 1850)

Lines

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

My sister! (’tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you;–and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
–It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We’ll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my Sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.

Hal Sirowitz
(1949 - )

Lending Out Books

You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.

David Budbill
(1940 -    )

Winter: Tonight: Sunset

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

William Baer

Snowflake

Timing’s everything. The vapor rises
high in the sky, tossing to and fro,
then freezes, suddenly, and crystallizes
into a perfect flake of miraculous snow.
For countless miles, drifting east above
the world, whirling about in a swirling free-
for-all, appearing aimless, just like love,
but sensing, seeking out, its destiny.
Falling to where the two young skaters stand,
hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips
itself about to ever-so-gently land,
a miracle, across her unkissed lips:
as he blocks the wind raging from the south,
leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.

Robert Frost
(1874-1963)

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.

Anonymous, Translated from Spanish
by Kenneth Rexroth, 1956 (above)

Letrilla-Cancionero

When the wind murmurs
Mother, in the leaves,
The drone puts me to sleep
Deep in the shade.

The calm wind blows
Lightly, softly,
And moves the ship
Of my mind.
I am so contented.
It seems to me
Heaven has given me
Too many blessings.
And the drone puts me to sleep
Deep in the shade.

If I happen to wake up
Covered with flowers
I cannot remember
Anything sorrowful.
All trace of my loss
Is hidden in dreams.
And new life comes
In the sound of the leaves.
And the drone puts me to sleep
Deep in the shade.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 - 1926)

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone Enough

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother’s face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

Pablo Neruda
(1904-1973)

I’m Explaining a Few Things
By Pablo Neruda  
 
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I’ll tell you all the news.
 
I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.
 
From there you could look out
over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.
 
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings –
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
 
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
 
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!
 
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
 
And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
 
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

Giacomo Leopardi
(1798 - 1837)
The Infinite

This solitary hill has always been dear to me,
And this hedgerow, which closes in the view
So well that one need hardly look upon the west.
But sitting and reflecting, from out of the endless
Expanse of night sky, and the supernatural
Silences and stillness so profound,
My heart, for a moment, no longer fears.
And, like the wind I hear whisper among these leaves,
I hear within that infinite silence a voice:
It overwhelms me with the eternal,
And the seasons passed away, and the present
And living, and with its own sound. Thus within
This immensity my thoughts are drowned…
And it is sweet to be shipwrecked in this sea.

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

Faith Poem

I need no assurances—I am a man who is
         pre-occupied of his own soul;
 
I do not doubt that whatever I know at a given
         time, there waits for me more which I do not
         know;
 
I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside
         the hands and face I am cognizant of, are
         now looking faces I am not cognizant of —
         calm and actual faces;
 
I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the
         world is latent in any iota of the world;
 
I do not doubt there are realizations I have
         no idea of, waiting for me through time
         and through the universes—also upon this
         earth;
 
I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the uni-
         verses are limitless—in vain I try to think
         how limitless;
 
I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of
         orbs, play their swift sports through the air
    on purpose—and that I shall one day be
         eligible to do as much as they, and more than
         they;
 
I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities,
         insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds,
         rejected refuse, than I have supposed;
 
I do not doubt there is more in myself than I have
         supposed—and more in all men and women
         —and more in my poems than I have
         supposed;
 
I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and
         on, millions of years;
 
I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and
         exteriors have their exteriors—and that the
         eye-sight has another eye-sight, and the hear-
         ing another hearing, and the voice another
         voice;
 
I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths
         of young men are provided for—and that the
         deaths of young women, and the deaths of
         little children, are provided for;
 
I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter
         what the horrors of them—no matter whose
         wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone
         down—are provided for, to the minutest
         point;
 
I do not doubt that shallowness, meanness, malig-
         nance, are provided for;

I do not doubt that cities, you, America, the
         remainder of the earth, politics, freedom,
         degradations, are carefully provided for;
 
I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen,
         any where, at any time, is provided for, in
         the inherences of things.

Stewart Todd
(1971 -  )

[Untitled]

We sat for the last time on that beach,
watching as the sun began to slip
slowly beneath the horizon.

As the last sliver of light surrendered
to the darkening water,
there were no romantic interludes,
no collapsing into each others arms
with emotions boiling over like lava rushing into the sea.

The brilliant embers danced wildly, temporarily,
up from the fire until one by one
they disappeared against the star-filled sky.
We huddled closer and closer,
as if, in a world so frigid and cold,
this fire was the only thing that could sustain us.
The warmth soaked our faces and hearts
until, on the turning away, we were buffeted
by the bitter night air.

We sat in the dark silence and listened to
“Still Crazy After All These Years” on the portable radio
when all we really wanted to say was “I love you.”
But we didn’t know the words, so
we fell slept on the cold beach,
and in the morning shook the sand from our shoes
and began our journey home.

Pablo Neruda
(1904 – 1973)

I Do Not Love You

I do not love you as if you were salt rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. 
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul. 

I love you as the plant that never blooms 
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. 
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way 

that this: where I does not exist, nor you, 
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand 
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranges in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer,
where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Pablo Neruda
(1904 – 1973)

Your Laughter

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892 – 1950)

Love Is Not All

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

William Cullen Bryant
(1794-1878)

A Song For New-Year’s Eve

Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay –
Stay till the good old year,
So long companion of our way,
Shakes hands, and leaves us here.
Oh stay, oh stay,
One little hour, and then away.

The year, whose hopes were high and strong,
Has now no hopes to wake;
Yet one hour more of jest and song
For his familiar sake.
Oh stay, oh stay,
One mirthful hour, and then away.

The kindly year, his liberal hands
Have lavished all his store.
And shall we turn from where he stand,
Because he gives no more?
Oh stay, oh stay,
One grateful hour, and then away.

Days brightly came and calmly went,
While yet he was our guest;
How cheerfully the week was spent!
How sweet the seventh day’s rest!
Oh stay, oh stay,
One golden hour, and then away.

Dear friends were with us, some who sleep
Beneath the coffin-lid:
What pleasant memories we keep
Of all they said and did!
Oh stay, oh stay,
One tender hour, and then away.

Even while we sing, he smiles his last,
And leaves our sphere behind.
The good old year is with the past;
Oh be the new as kind!
Oh stay, oh stay,
One parting strain, and then away.

Robert Graves
(1895-1985)

1915

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

James Wright
(1927 - 1980)

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. The love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms.
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Philip Booth
(1925 - )

Hope

Old spirit, in and beyond me,
keep, and extend me. Amid strangers,
friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
see clear, reach deep. Open me to find due words,
that I may shape them to ploughshares of my own making.
After such luck, however late, give me to give to
the oldest dance …. Then to good sleep,
and - if it happens - glad waking.

Laurie-Anne Bosselaar
(1943 - )

Fall

So it’s today, and in the chokecherry this year:
the first leaves turn ochre, by the open gate.

I grab the sweater you left on a chair, wrap it
around my shoulders, and - as I did for days last year

until I couldn’t keep up with the season - I pick
every single rusting leaf, each fading flower

and hide them in my apron pocket: their crush
clandestine against my belly. It’s a simple gift

for you - for us - such and easy thing to do
for a few more days of summer.

Pablo Neruda
(1904 – 1973)

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

Jack Gilbert
(1925 – )

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Li-Young Lee
(1957 – )

The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

Pablo Neruda
(1904-1973)

Poetry

And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from t< >he branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

William Shakespeare
April 23, 1564 - April 23, 1616

Sonnet #155

THEY that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow—
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the Lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 - 1822

from Prometheus Unbound

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or nights;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to Hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Stewart Todd

Kindergarten Lessons

It was so important to keep
my box of crayons arranged
exactly like hers,
that I’d only drawn two circles
on my paper at the
end of drawing time.
That was the same day
I got my first wrong answer
in our activity book and
she laughed at me.

“Of the red wheelbarrows,
which two are exactly the same?”

I cried during nap time,
but later in the day
purposely put my red crayon
next to the black one
and told her that
no two wheelbarrows
were EXACTLY the same.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807 – 1882

A Psalm of Life
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

Tell me not, in < >mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Robert Hayden
1913 - 1980

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

William Ernest Henley
1849 - 1903

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Maya Angelou
(1928 - )

From On The Pulse of the Morning

Spoken at the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony
January 20, 1993

…Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the Rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers–desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours–your Passages have been paid
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

John Updike
(1932 - )

The Angels

They are above us all the time,
the good gentlemen, Mozart and Bach,
Scarlatti and Handel and Brahms,
lavishing measures of light down upon us,
telling us, over and over, there is a realm
above this plane of silent compromise.
They are around us everywhere, the old seers,
Matisse and Vermeer, Cézanne and Piero,
greeting us echoing in subway tunnels,
springing like winter flowers from postcards,
Scotch-taped to white kitchen walls,
waiting larger than life in shadowy galleries
to whisper that edges of color
lie all about us as innocent as grass.
They are behind us, beneath us,
the abysmal books, Shakespeare and Tolstoy,
the Bible and Proust and Cervantes,
burning in memory like leaky furnace doors,
minepits of honesty from which we escaped
with dilated suspicions. Love us, dead thrones:
sing us to sleep, awaken our eyes,
comfort with terror our mortal afternoons.

John Dryden
1631 - 1700

Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

translating Horace (65 – 8 BC), Odes, Book III, xxix

Stephen Dunn
(1939 - )

A Secret Life

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that’s unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It’s why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who’ll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

Mary Oliver
(1935 - )
Peonies

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open —
pools of lace,
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again —
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

William Wordsworth
(1770 – 1850)

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Blake
1757 - 1827

Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

William Shakespeare
April 23, 1564 - April 23, 1616

Sonnet #30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thought I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan th’ expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892 – 1950)

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
The sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844 – 1889

God’s Grandeur

THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.