From a Country Overlooked

There are no creatures you cannot love.

A frog calling at God

From the moon-filled ditch

As you stand on the country road in the June night.

The sound is enough to make the stars weep

With happiness.

In the morning the landscape green

Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.

The day is carried across its hours

Without any effort by the shining insects

That are living their secret lives.

The space between the prairie horizons

Makes us ache with its beauty.

Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue

To the farthest cold dark in the universe.

The cottonwood also talks to you

Of breeze and speckled sunlight.

You are at home in these

great empty places

along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.

You are comfortable in this spot

so full of grace and being

that it sparkles like jewels

spilled on water.

--Tom Hennen

The Way it Is

One morning you might wake up

to realize that the knot in your stomach

had loosened itself and slipped away,

and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart

had gradually, and without your really noticing,

been filled in—patched like a pothole, not quite

the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you

that your life, though not the way

you planned it, and maybe not even entirely

the way you wanted it, is nonetheless—

persistently, abundantly, miraculously—

exactly the way it is.

--Lynn Ungar

A Scrap in Time

Something about the relentless beauty

of the dahlias this year makes me forget

lists and calls and news and aches as

I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,

watching them bloom in real time, not

wanting to miss a moment of the long stems

rising, the red color deepening then fading

from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse

begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening

again, and now a hundred years pass,

now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden

bed is gone and the fence is gone and

the trees and the ditch and the home

are gone, and there’s no way to know

this was once a place where dahlias grew.

Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you

to come stand here with me to watch

the dahlias open themselves to the sun,

each petal a hymn to the present,

a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time

we might put in a vase and marvel as

all around it the whole world spins.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Dreams Before Waking

Despair falls:

the shadow of a building

they are raising in the direct path

of your slender ray of sunlight

Slowly the steel girders grow

the skeletal framework rises

yet the western light still filters

through it all

still glances off the plastic sheeting

they wrap around it

for dead of winter

At the end of winter something changes

a faint subtraction

from consolations you expected

an innocent brilliance that does not come

though the flower shops set out

once again on the pavement

their pots of tight-budded sprays

the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

and at such a price

though someone must buy them

you study those hues as if with hunger

Despair falls

like the day you come home

from work, a summer evening

transparent with rose-blue light

and see they are filling in

the framework

the girders are rising

beyond your window

that seriously you live

in a different place

though you have never moved

and will not move, not yet

but will give away

your potted plants to a friend 

on the other side of town

along with the cut crystal flashing

in the window-frame

will forget the evenings

of watching the street, the sky

the planes in the feathered afterglow:

will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

where still you can manage

to go on paying rent

where still you can believe

it’s the old neighborhood:

even the woman who sleeps at night

in the barred doorway — wasn’t she always there?

and the man glancing, darting

for food in the supermarket trash –

when did his hunger come to this?

what made the difference?

what will make it for you?

What will make it for you?

You don’t want to know the stages

and those who go through them don’t want to tell

You have four locks on the door

your savings, your respectable past

your strangely querulous body, suffering

sicknesses of the city no one can name

You have your pride, your bitterness

your memories of sunset

you think you can make it straight through

if you don’t speak of despair.

What would it mean to live

in a city whose people were changing

each other’s despair into hope? –

You yourself must change it. –

what would it feel like to know

your country was changing? –

You yourself must change it. –

Though your life felt arduous

new and unmapped and strange

what would it means to stand on the first

page of the end of despair?

 - Adrienne Rich

For You Who Are About to Give Up

Do it. Give up

the old ghosts, the old fears; give up

the shadowy house of childhood,

the voices like knives spilled in the kitchen;

give up the stories

you never meant to be, your father's

rage, your mother's silence inside you.

Stay, stay

in this one world

but give it up, give it up to wonder.

I am here. I will hold you

through the hard part. I will thumb away

the cold thorns from your face.

And then,

my love, when you are ready,

when you've told yourself

no one is ever ready,

give up

that life you never meant to be,

those clothes that have worn you

like old ghosts, those dreams

you have carried in you like winters.

Give up

and walk out through the rivers

and look at it, that old moon

in the spruces. She is trying, she is still trying

to tell you: like a child,

like a bride stepping

from a wedding dress, give up

every heft you have borrowed

and live the life you have imagined.

In your life is where the dead are saved.

--Joseph Fasano

“A man who can’t cry is a social time bomb... In my village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace.”

— Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

September

And now the first winds

purr what they've been learning

like a children's choir

flipping through their hymnals.

This test again, this wintering,

this bite.

Summer, Summer's roads are over-

And all these leaves,

this foliage on your shoulders-

like all the ghosts of childhood's

wild silence

laying on their hands

as though to guide you.

It is time to fall into your life.

-Joseph Fasano

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs-all this resinous, unretractable earth.

--Jane Hirshfield

The Difficult Countryside

I talk more to trees and mice than I let on. Flies, too.

And cars. Actually, I’m a regular chatterbox

to what doesn’t respond. So I understand prayer.

The way a street’s a street, but catch it right, and with

good framing, the street achieves art. So I get out my bike 

and take off down it, with headphones and a little cloud

of dust. I need to get myself to Marfa and see the lights.

Not really, but saying that gives me a starting point.

I’m having a debate with my third eye. It goes like this:

if I have a deeply unsettling dream about someone,

does it change my perception of them? Should it?

Maybe it should change my perception of me.

Maybe I’m catching some subtle clue my sleep

is trying to warn me about. I ask the trees and mice about it,

the flies and cows. Aren’t we all injured by our art?

All the grandmothers, as one, are banging apple pies

against their kitchen windows, wanting out of our flashbacks.

I wave. I know everyone in this town. I’m filled with purpose,

because playing music makes everything a movie.

I appeared from nowhere, to tell you this. I will be gone 

just as fast, turning the corner of University Drive

and Sixteenth Street, spelled out just like that. S I X

T E E N T H. I’ve never been this happy before 

and I don’t know what to do with myself. The wind’s even

at my back. The sun is mostly down, 8 pm. Summer’s

listening, but only to an ‘80s playlist, so we’re safe.

Why isn’t everyone doing this? America! What?

I don’t know. But it feels great out here. The trees say hi.

--John Gallaher

Can I weave a nest of silence

The phoebe sits on her nest

Hour after hour,

Day after day,

Waiting for life to burst out

From under her warmth.

Can I weave a nest of silence,

weave it of listening,

listening, listening,

Layer upon layer?

But one must first become small,

Nothing but a presence,

Attentive as a nesting bird,

Proffering no slightest wish

Toward anything

that might happen or be given,

Only the warm, faithful waiting,

contained in one’s smallness.

Beyond the question,

the silence.

Before the answer,

the silence.

--May Sarton

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole,

while learning to sing.

--Rashani Rea