Sky

The sky is where we should have started.

A window without a windowsill, without a frame, without a pane.

An opening wide open, with nothing

beyond it.

I don’t have to wait for a starry night,

nor crane my neck,

to look at the sky.

I have the sky behind me, and close at hand and on my eyelids.

It is the sky that wraps me tight

and raises me from underneath.

The highest mountains

are no closer than the deepest valleys

to the sky.

No place has any more of it

than any other place.

A cloud is as thoroughly

crushed by the sky as a grave.

A mole is as high, sky high

as an owl beating its wings.

Whatever falls into an abyss,

falls from sky to sky.

Friable, fluid, rocky,

flammable, volatile stretches

of sky, crumbs of sky,

gusts of sky, heaps of sky.

Sky is omnipresent,

even in darkness under the skin.

I eat the sky, I excrete the sky.

I’m a trap in a trap,

an inhabited inhabitant,

an embrace embraced,

a question that answers a question.

Dividing earth and sky

is not the right way

to think about this wholeness.

It only allows one to live

at a more precise address—

were I to be searched for

I’d be found much faster.

My distinguishing marks

are rapture and despair.

—Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak

“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” 

--David Graeber, 1961-2020

This is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.

--Frederick Buechner

On the last day of the world

On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.    ~W. S. Merwin

On the last day of the world, I would want

to feed you. Raspberries. Thin slices of apple.

Peaches so ripe they drip down our chins,

down our necks. I would want to sit with you

beneath a tree, no we’ll climb a tree, no

we’ll plant a tree, yes all of these. On the last

day of the world, I want to give myself permission

to feel exactly what I feel, to be exactly who I am,

to shed every layer of should and meet you

that way. Knowing we have only hours left,

could we put down our arguments with ourselves

and each other and find no energy to pick them up again?

On that day, I want us to write the last poem

together and let the writing undo us, let it teach us

how to get out of the way, how to obey what emerges.

Let’s run outside, no matter the weather, and praise

the light till the light is gone, and then praise the dark.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer 

Directions

First you'll come to the end of the freeway.

Then it's not so much north on Woodland Avenue

as it is a feeling that the pines are taller and weigh more,

and the road, you'll notice,

is older with faded lines and unmown shoulders.

You'll see a cemetery on your right

and another later on your left.

Sobered, drive on.

                             Drive on for miles

if the fields are full of hawkweed and daisies.

Sometimes a spotted horse

will gallop along the fence. Sometimes you'll see

a hawk circling, sometimes a vulture.

You'll cross the river many times

over smaller and smaller bridges.

You'll know when you're close;

people always say they have a sudden sensation

that the horizon, which was always far ahead,

is now directly behind them.

At this point you may want to park

and proceed on foot, or even

on your knees.

--Connie Wanek

The Well (Excerpt)

…But the miracle had come simply 

from allowing yourself to know 

that you had found it, that this time

someone walking out into the clear air 

from far inside you had decided not to walk 

past it any more; the miracle had come

at the roadside in the kneeling to drink 

and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed

and the memory you held and the realization 

that in this silence you no longer had to keep 

your eyes and ears averted from the place 

that could save you, that you had been given 

the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden 

pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking 

with her bent back, her bowed head 

and her careful explanations…

From Pilgrim: Poems by David Whyte

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,

because I don't mean these poems only

but the unseen

unbelievable effort it takes to live

the life that goes on between them,

I think all the time about invisible work.

About the young mother on Welfare

I interviewed years ago,

who said, "It's hard.

You bring him to the park,

run rings around yourself keeping him safe,

cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,

and there's no one

to say what a good job you're doing,

how you were patient and loving

for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."

And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself

because I am lonely,

when all the while,

as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,

thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,

the slow, unglamorous work of healing,

the way worms in the garden

tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe

and bees ransack this world into being,

while owls and poets stalk shadows,

our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers

for everything, and the sea

is a mother too,

whispering and whispering to us

long after we have stopped listening.

I stopped and let myself lean

a moment, against the blue

shoulder of the air. The work

of my heart

is the work of the world's heart.

There is no other art. 

—Alison Luterman

 We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

--Herman Melville

Perhaps the World Ends Here

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

--from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo.

Why I Smile at Strangers

In difficult times, carry something beautiful in your heart.

—Blaise Pascal

And so today, I walk the streets

with vermillion maple leaves inside me,

and the deep purple of late-blooming larkspur

and the lilting praise of meadowlark.

I carry with me thin creeks with clear water

and the three-quarters moon

and the spice-warm scent of nasturtiums.

And honey in the sunlight.

And words from Neruda and

slow melodies by Erik Satie.

It is easy sometimes to believe

that everything is wrong.

That people are cruel and the world

destroyed and the end of it all

imminent. But there is yet goodness

beyond imagining—the creamy

white flesh of ripe pears

and the velvety purr of a cat in my lap

and the white smear of milky way—

I carry these things in my heart,

more certain than ever that one way

to counteract evil is to ceaselessly honor what’s good

and share it, share it until

we break the choke hold of fear

and at least for a few linked moments,

we believe completely in beauty,

growing beauty, yes, beauty.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Night. O you whose countenance, dissolved

in deepness, hovers above my face.

You who are the heaviest counterweight

to my astounding contemplation.

Night, that trembles as reflected in my eyes,

but in itself strong;

inexhaustible creation, dominant,

enduring beyond the earth's endurance;

Night, full of newly created stars that leave

trails of fire streaming from their seams

as they soar in inaudible adventure

through interstellar space:

how, overshadowed by your all-embracing vastness,

I appear minute! --

Yet, being one with the ever more darkening earth,

I dare to be in you.

  --  Rainer Maria Rilke

In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love

“In the evening we shall be examined on love.”

 - St. John of the Cross

And it won’t be multiple choice,

though some of us would prefer it that way.

Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on

when we should be sticking to the point, if not together.

In the evening there shall be implications

our fear will change to complications. No cheating,

we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure the cost of being true

to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned

that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more

daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties

and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city

and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested

like defendants on trial, cross-examined

till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No,

in the evening, after the day has refused to testify,

we shall be examined on love like students

who don’t even recall signing up for the course

and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once

from the heart and not off the top of their heads.

And when the evening is over and it’s late,

the student body asleep, even the great teachers

retired for the night, we shall stay up

and run back over the questions, each in our own way:

what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity

will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now

to look back and know

we did not fail.

--Thomas Centolella

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,

something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.

It doesn’t need you to hold it down.

It doesn’t need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,

and disappears when it wants to.

You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house

and now live over a quarry of noise and dust

cannot make you unhappy.

Everything has a life of its own,

it too could wake up filled with possibilities

of coffee cake and ripe peaches,

and love even the floor which needs to be swept,

the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough

to contain so much happiness,

you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you

into everything you touch. You are not responsible.

You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit

for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,

and in that way, be known.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

Directions

You know the brick path in back of the house,

the one you see from the kitchen window,

the one that bends around the far end of the garden

where all the yellow primroses are?

And you know how if you leave the path

and walk up into the woods you come

to a heap of rocks, probably pushed

down during the horrors of the Ice Age,

and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now

against the light-brown fallen leaves?

And farther on, you know

the small footbridge with the broken railing

and if you go beyond that you arrive

at the bottom of that sheep’s head hill?

Well, if you start climbing, and you

might have to grab hold of a sapling

when the going gets steep,

you will eventually come to a long stone

ridge with a border of pine trees

which is as high as you can go

and a good enough place to stop.

The best time is late afternoon

when the sun strobes through

the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

and when you find an agreeable rock

to sit on, you will be able to see

the light pouring down into the woods

and breaking into the shapes and tones

of things and you will hear nothing

but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

and if this is your day you might even

spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things

how the voices of light enter the body

and begin to recite their stories

how the earth holds us painfully against

its breast made of humus and brambles

how we who will soon be gone regard

the entities that continue to return

greener than ever, spring water flowing

through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

passing over the hills and the ground

where we stand in the tremble of thought

taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Still, let me know before you set out.

Come knock on my door

and I will walk with you as far as the garden

with one hand on your shoulder.

I will even watch after you and not turn back

to the house until you disappear

into the crowd of maple and ash,

heading up toward the hill,

piercing the ground with your stick.

--Billy Collins

The Weighing (extract)

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

--Jane Hirshfield

Advice from Me to Myself

Listen up, old bad-karma Patrul,

You dweller-in-distraction.

For ages now you’ve been

Beguiled, entranced, and fooled by appearances.

Are you aware of that? Are you?

Right this very instant, when you’re

Under the spell of mistaken perception

You’ve got to watch out.

Don’t let yourself get carried away by this fake and empty life.

Your mind is spinning around

About carrying out a lot of useless projects:

It’s a waste! Give it up!

Thinking about the hundred plans you want to accomplish,

With never enough time to finish them,

Just weighs down your mind.

You’re completely distracted

By all these projects, which never come to an end,

But keep spreading out more, like ripples in water.

Don’t be a fool: for once, just sit tight. . . .

If you let go of everything—

Everything, everything—

That’s the real point!

--Patrul Rinpoche (19th-century wandering Dzogchen master)

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive 

as consciousness 

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little. And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember 

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater.

--Louise Gluck

Walking

We need to walk

to know sacred places.

 

Healthy feet feel the heartbeat

of our Mother Earth,

Sitting Bull said long ago.

Walt Whitman knew that, too.

 

When we go by wheel

we roll over the land

as if it were nothing

but miles left behind.

 

When we go by air

we cut off our vision

and even our spirits

may take so long

to catch up to our bodies

that our eyes will be empty

of all but flight.

 

We need to walk

to remember the songs,

not only our own

but those of the birds,

those kept in the arms

of the hills and the wind.

 

We need to walk

to know sacred places

those around us

and those within.

 

 --Joseph Bruchac

from No Borders, Holy Cow Press

Born in 1942, Joseph Bruchac is a storyteller and poet whose work often reflects his Abenaki Indian ancestry and his lifelong interest in American Indian history and culture.  He has a B.A. from Cornell University, a Master’s degree in Literature from Syracuse, and a Ph.D. in Comparative literature from the Union Institute of Ohio.  He spent three years as a volunteer teacher in Ghana, West Africa, eight years directing a college program in a maximum security WBAprison and has taught at Skidmore College, SUNY/Albany, Hamilton College, and Columbia University.  Winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, his poems, stories, and essays have appeared in hundreds of publications from American Poetry Review to National Geographic.  Bruchac is the author of over 120 books. 

Birdfoot's Grampa

The old man

must have stopped our car

two dozen times to climb out

and gather into his hands

the small toads blinded

by our lights and leaping, 

live drops of rain. 

The rain was falling,

a mist about his white hair

and I kept saying

you can't save them all

accept it, get back in

we've got places to go.

 

But, leathery hands full

of wet brown life

knee deep in the summer

roadside grass

he just smiled and said

they have place to go

too.

 --Joseph Bruchac

from Entering Onondaga, Cold Mountain Press

Near the mountains

NEAR THE MOUNTAINS

Near the mountains

footsteps on the ground

sound hollow

as if to remind us

this earth is a drum.

We must watch our steps closely

to play the right tune.

--Joseph Bruchac

from Near the Mountains, White Pine Press

no handbook

there’s no handbook

for any of this 

there are no hard and 

fast rules for times

like these 

you’re doing the best you can

holding things together

while the world falls apart 

in this age of fear and fret

you don’t need to be perfect; 

you just need to be gentle 

with yourself and everyone else 

because that’s all you

can really control, isn’t it? 

yes, things might unravel a

bit more before this is

all done 

you might as well

and it’s okay if 

you do 

while the world

is resetting

its router 

we can take turns

deciding who gets

to cry on the couch 

we can take turns becoming 

a balm for one another 

we can take turns yelling

up into the silent sky 

we can take turns 

having insomnia 

we can take turns being 

confessionals for one another 

we can take turns brushing

the tears off of each other’s face 

don’t worry about getting

all of this right 

you won’t 

don’t worry about making

mistakes 

you will 

~ you’re doing the best you can 

there is only one great commandment for 

enduring a storm - and it’s this: 

go easy,

my love,

go easy

--john roedel

I go down to the shore

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall —

what should I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

--Mary Oliver

You must forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did to you is unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer and hurt yourself every time you remember what they did to you.

—Don Miguel Ruiz

What I know about living is the pain

is never just ours.

Every time I hurt I know

the wound is an echo, so I keep listening

for the moment when the grief

becomes a window,

when I can see what I couldn’t see before.

Through the glass of my most bartered dream

I watched a dandelion lose its mind

in the wind and when it did,

it scattered a thousand seeds.

-- Andrea Gibson