Next Time

I'll know the names of all of the birds

and flowers, and not only that, I'll

tell you the name of the piano player

I'm hearing right now on the kitchen

radio, but I won't be in the kitchen,

I'll be walking a street in

New York or London, about

to enter a coffee shop where people

are reading or working on their

laptops. They'll look up and smile.

Next time I won't waste my heart

on anger; I won't care about

being right. I'll be willing to be

wrong about everything and to

concentrate on giving myself away.

Next time, I'll rush up to people I love,

look into their eyes, and kiss them, quick.

I'll give everyone a poem I didn't write,

one specially chosen for that person.

They'll hold it up and see a new

world. We'll sing the morning in,

and I will keep in touch with friends,

writing long letters when I wake from

a dream where they appear on the

Orient Express. "Meet me in Istanbul,"

I'll say, and they will.

-- Joyce Sutphen

From After Words

Once the World Was Perfect

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.

Then we took it for granted.

Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.

Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.

And once Doubt ruptured the web,

All manner of demon thoughts

Jumped through—

We destroyed the world we had been given

For inspiration, for life—

Each stone of jealousy, each stone

Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.

No one was without a stone in his or her hand.

There we were,

Right back where we had started.

We were bumping into each other

In the dark.

And now we had no place to live, since we didn't know

How to live with each other.

Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another

And shared a blanket.

A spark of kindness made a light.

The light made an opening in the darkness.

Everyone worked together to make a ladder.

A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,

And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,

And their children, all the way through time—

To now, into this morning light to you.

--Joy Harjo

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.  Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo.  

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don't paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I'm telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

—Kaylin Haught

The Light We Leave Behind

A star chart tells me

that the star I am seeing tonight

is 500 light years away.

It may have died 499 years ago,

and I am still seeing its last light.

Stars are born, they live, and they die.

What is the light that remains when we leave?

If I die after writing this poem, is this my light,

and how long might that light remain and be seen?

I wondered last night and still this morning

about these questions, and still now,

standing again outside

under a mackerel sky dappled, rippled with clouds

and the sun, our family star,

which will also die.

Then, there will be no light remaining.

Perhaps, this is not what you believed.

When it dies, the Earth dies with it.

No last light to come after it.

In its end, the sun will expand

into a red giant

and will vaporize the Earth.

My son rises

and joins me outside

his coffee steaming a small cloud

into the December air.

In this enormous moment,

we look into the sky and universe.

We are a fortnight from the year ending

and hopeful for many more circles

around the sun. We are expanding,

gathering our light, and sharing it

while we can still see it reflected

in those constellating nearby.

--Kenneth Ronkowitz

I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically “see” things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become “old men with snow on their shoulders,” or the lake looks like a “giant eye.” The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, “the mirror with nothing reflected in it.” This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.

— Linda Gregg, from “The Art of Finding”

Breaking News

When the house seems to breathe

on its own, and I stare out the window

without purpose, in love with loneliness,

all of my moments—past, present

and future—merge into one. And I see

among hummingbirds, moths and bees

tonight’s breaking news: a pair

of goldfinches, each of which balances

on the bobbing head of a zinnia,

pecking at petals to get to the center

of the flower, where they must sense

some sweetness waits just for them.

—James Crews

My Dead Friends

My friends are dead who were

the arches    the pillars of my life 

the structural relief when

the world gave none.

My friends who knew me as I knew them

their bodies folded into the ground or burnt to ash.

If I got on my knees

might I lift my life as a turtle carries her home?  

Who if I cried out would hear me?

My friends—with whom I might have spoken of this—are gone.

--Marie Howe

The Work of Happiness

It's the floating ache I don't know how to answer,

hovering in the filtered morning so full of peace

and wanting.

I keep telling myself I will get to the work of happiness

when there is time, but always there is someone I love

dying and a new promotion to apply for.

One of my chickens pecks out the eye of another.

Who is to say what causes this wild need to damage

ourselves and others, to take

the whole curtain down with us.

Their coop is bigger than my own bedroom

with three nesting boxes for every hen.

But most days it doesn't seem to matter.

They fight over one,

they fight over a single blade of grass in a field of grass.

I've watched them each take the tender limbs of a frog and pull.

Nothing good

can come of this.

This morning has arrived with its beautiful light, and the entire day

stretches out in front of me, but I'm already unhappy,

already wanting another.

--Brittney Scott

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.

Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.

Don't even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth

that invades as dust and then the dead

foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles

or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry

who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic—decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place

you don't even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner

again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,

or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons

in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

and talk to the dead

who drift in through the screened windows, who collect

patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything

except what destroys

the insulation between yourself and your experience

or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

this ruse you call necessity.

by Louise Erdrich

From Original Fire.

The Hope of Loving

What keeps us alive? What allows us to endure?

I think it is the hope of loving,

or being loved.

I heard a fable once about the sun going on a journey

to find its source, and how the moon wept

without her lover’s

warm gaze.

We weep when light does not reach our hearts. We wither

like fields if someone close

does not rain their

kindness upon us.

--Daniel Ladinksky (inspired by Meister Eckhart)

The Happiness of Trees

I slept that summer on a screen porch in the woods

    with the creatures and insects singing so loudly

my mind seemed to join them—out there without me—

    to move around like a breeze from form to form

and then to return as a fox or a cicada,

    some other night creature, to slip back inside me

humming whatever it had heard, patterns

    I couldn’t sing along with but felt inside

like the happiness of trees when a soft wind

    turns their leaves’ pale underbellies up to the sky

and makes the sap rise. I loved to wake

    before myself, to silence and fog.

Sometimes I got up and walked out into the chilly woods

    and sometimes I turned over as though this happiness

might last forever, and slept just a while

    longer, until the first birds sang.

-- Michael Hettich

Mystery of Life

I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. The more I look at a thing, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I want to see. It is like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and another, and another. And each layer is more beautiful than the last.

This is the way I look at the world. I don't see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.

I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere.

 -- Henry Miller

Spiritual literacy is recognizing the sacred in everything around us. Everything around you and everything you do has spiritual significance. The point is that it's all around us. You just have to have the eyes to see.

- Mary Ann Brussat

There Is an Old Woman Inside Me

There is an old woman inside me

with long gray hair and fuzzy green eyes.

She is soft in the way stones are soft

when tumbled by waves for a hundred years.

She is still as I run from room to room

content to listen to my bluster,

to watch the day unfold.

Her smile is gentle as dawn light

as she hums a wordless tune.

And as I make calls and check schedules,

she curls in the lap of my busyness

like an ash-colored cat,

her body warm and relaxed.

I love the old woman inside me,

gnarled as the branches of an old peach tree.

She is no stranger to how the world changes.

Every day I practice to be more like her,

slow as honey, quiet as moonlight,

familiar as the woman in the mirror.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Learning from the Painting on My Kitchen Wall

                  with thanks to Rob Schultheis

She is beautiful, the woman

on the wall with one long braid

and an owlet perched on her hand.

Not beautiful the way young girls dream,

but beautiful in the way old women dream.

which is to say she is deeply seen.

Sometimes I swear she watches me

as I slice the shiitake, as I chop the kale.

Her eyes are serious and always keen.

Her gaze makes me beautiful, too,

beautiful the way a morning is beautiful—

because it arrives every day as if

night cannot contain it; beautiful

the way the sun is beautiful, because

it needs no praise to share all its light.

By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I Meant to Do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today—

 But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

 And all the leaves were calling me. 

And the wind went sighing over the land,

 Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out its shining hand—

 So what could I do but laugh and go?

 by Richard Le Gallienne

When Feeling Lost

Sit alone by an open window

as rain-cooled wind tosses the trees,

scatters the white petals of viburnum

like your own useless thoughts

on soft mulch beneath. Hear how the air

carries the calls of newly fledged wrens

resting for now in a brush pile, 

afraid to fly. Let peace swoop down

into your life, perch in the empty branches

of your lungs with each newborn breath.

Let stillness take your hand as when

you were a child, and they said:

if you’re lost in the woods or confused 

by a crowd, it helps to stay in one place—

not moving, doing nothing so that 

you may be found again.

—James Crews

Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly, 

to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate. 

And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,

perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire,

caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.

—Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell 

Excerpt from ‘Coleman’s Bed’

See with every turning day,

how each season wants to make

a child of you again, wants you to become

a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,

watch how it weathers you to a testing

in the tried and true, tells you

with each falling leaf, to leave and slip away,

even from the branch that held you,

to be courageous, to go when you need to,

to be like that last word you’d want to say

before you leave the world.

…

David Whyte

Stars

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but a pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind

roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back easily.

Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos -

even the distant night bird

as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent -

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I’m forever saying.

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another. 

by Mary Oliver 

The New Life

This is how it is: we live again.

We rise up

from the deathbed in our grave-clothes

and we walk again

and we open

every window,

and we live again, though living

is the cost.

Yes, my friends, I have a thing to tell you:

My story

is like any, on this wild earth:

I rose up, I was broken,

and I rose again-

and although I closed my arms

around my body,

although I said that darkened harp

was ruined,

the nights have filled my life with brutal music

that has taught me that we're only here

to listen,

to hold each other awhile

and to listen,

and to carry each other

with the song of songs inside us

that is wiser, and is greater than our changes,

and that sings the way most wholly when we're lost.

-Joseph Fasano

Illumination

Always   there is something more to know

      what lingers      at the edge of thought

awaiting illumination       as in

      this secondhand book       full

of annotations     daring the margins in pencil

a light stroke as if

      the writer of these small replies

meant not to leave them    forever

      meant to erase

evidence of this private interaction

      Here     a passage underlined   there

a single star on the page

      as in a night sky       cloud-swept and hazy

where only the brightest appears

      a tiny spark     I follow

its coded message    try to read in it

the direction of the solitary mind

      that thought to pencil in

a jagged arrow   It 

      is a bolt of lightning

where it strikes

      I read the line over and over

as if I might discern

      the little fires set

the flames of an idea    licking the page

how knowledge burns      Beyond

       the exclamation point

its thin agreement     angle of surprise

there are questions   the word why

So much is left

      untold     Between

the printed words     and the self-conscious scrawl

      between   what is said and not

white space framing the story

      the way the past      unwritten

eludes us   So much

      is implication      the afterimage

of measured syntax     always there

      ghosting the margins that words

their black-lined authority

      do not cross     Even

as they rise up   to meet us

      the white page hovers beneath

silent    incendiary     waiting

 by Natasha Trethewey

From MONUMENT © 2018 Natasha Trethewey.

If failure is a great unlearning, meditation is a profound act of failure.

--Sarah Kokernot

Rowan's Ravine

It's half past eight,

the grass is catching its breath after a long day,

July's fierce sun is simmering down.

My legs half-soaked

under silk sheets of water,

wet sand kissing my toes,

soft pebbles tickling my feet.

A prairie breeze swifts by,

carrying me away to the

golden light at the edge

of the horizon as it sinks

beneath the blue.

Here,

I throw myself into

the arms of my favorite lake

and dissolve like a grain of salt.

I feel my heart floating, my skin

breathing, and for a few

fleeting moments, I let go

of all the weight off

my chest, my shoulders.

Here,

I ponder how the sand,

the water, the pebbles

never tire of all the feet,

the toes, the hearts

that have been here,

and will come here

a thousand sunsets from now,

just to feel alive

in the arms of

their favorite lake.

by Abdulsalam Abo Al Shamat

How to Survive

You don't have to know what your life is.

You don't have to wake today in the summer light

and dance your way into the kitchen.

Your tired heart doesn't have to make

a sound.

Listen. Just keep breathing

and the magic will happen.

When Lazarus

felt a hand upon his shoulder,

he didn't ask

if he deserved that mercy.

He stood. He took

the new life.

Friend, don't lie down forever.

Couldn't you also

be chosen?

Hasn't anyone told you?

The amount of agony

you carry

is only the vastness of your

love

waiting in the darkness to be found.

-Joseph Fasano