Break open a cherry tree,

and there are no flowers. 

But the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. 

--Ikkyu

Hopelessness is impatience in disguise. If you are hopeless, that means you think the game is already over. And I'm here to tell you: the game is NOT over yet. 

--Joanna Macy

Fire

What makes a fire burn

is space between the logs,

a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

too many logs

packed in too tight

can douse the flames

almost as surely

as a pail of water would.

So building fires

requires attention

to the spaces in between,

as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build

open spaces

in the same way

we have learned

to pile on the logs,

then we can come to see how

it is fuel, and absence of the fuel

together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log

lightly from time to time.

A fire

grows

simply because the space is there,

with openings

in which the flame

that knows just how it wants to burn

can find its way.

--Judy Brown, from The Sea Accepts All Rivers

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body's been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

--Mark Strand

(1934-)

The Change

Overnight, the frost

took every pink zinnia

every creamy dahlia,

fading their colors to brown.

The nasturtiums have slumped

into dense wilted tangle.

The marigolds hold themselves tall

in a blackened and upright

surrender. For now,

the bright, fresh bouquets

I made yesterday are still

bright and fresh in their vases.

This beauty, we know, won’t stay.

The message is simple:

All that rises passes away.

I see it in these hands

that planted and watered

and weeded and picked—

my skin now wrinkled and thin

as frost-withered petals.

Here: the chance to witness

my own rising and passing.

How natural to age, to die.

The flowers in the vase will wilt.

With every day, so do I.

Such strange gift. First

the joy of putting the self

in service to making something

beautiful. Then, beyond joy,

the grace in learning to let it all go.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Leaves

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

--Ursula K LeGuin

We call it letting go,

as if the work were soft-

a gentle unhanding,

a sigh into the dark.

But really, it is labour.

Elbow-deep in what once was,

rolling up sleeves,

turning what we thought was finished

into the start of something fertile.

Rot is not surrender.

It is participation.

The slow alchemy of apple cores, heartbreak,

old selves and half-remembered dreams-

each softened by rain,

each broken open by time.

To compost is to stay.

To lean close when it smells of endings,

and know that endings are only

the earth’s way of rearranging life.

So I do not “let go.”

I kneel.

I dig my hands into the heat of decay

and whisper thanks to the worms

for their silent teachings.

This is how I make peace with change:

not by release,

but by return,

by trusting that the work of rot

is the work of love,

and that what I tend here,

beneath my nails and grief,

will one day feed me again.

- Brigit Anna McNeill

After Samhain

Now, for a while, the dark

stays dark. The long nights

will be long no matter

how you pray for light.

This god will not be rushed.

But she will offer you

the thick black folds of her cloak,

where you're finally free

to lose everything

that can't be kept.

--James Pearson

The birds have vanished into the sky. 

And now the last cloud drains away. 

We sit together, the mountain and I 

until only the mountain remains.

--Li Po

A Little Pep Talk

The swirling ash

doesn’t try

to be become

log again.

The flying leaves

don’t attempt

to return

to the tree.

The girl

can’t untwist

her genome

back into

separate strands.

The flour

in the bread

can’t return

to the sack,

can’t undo

the kneading

of hands.

In all things

lives a memory

of letting go

and the chance

to transform

into what

it can’t know.

What do you say

to that, heart?

Good self,

what do you say

to that?

--Rosemerry Wahtolla Trommer

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the   

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

take them up like the male and female   

paper dolls and bang them together   

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

--Sharon Olds

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

from The Miracle of Mindfulness

Most people try

hard to do good

and find out too late

they should have

tried softer.

-- Andrea Gibson

When I point to the obviously wonderful aspects of my life as the source of my joy, it predisposes me to believing the challenges in my life are what rob me of my joy. As soon as I began exploring the ways I could be grateful for the hard stuff, I no longer felt like the outer-world was the sole dictator of what was happening in my inner-world. 

--Andrea Gibson

Breath, you invisible poem!

Pure, continuous exchange

with all that is, flow and counterflow

where rhythmically I come to be.

Each time a wave that occurs just once

in a sea I discover I am.

You, innermost of oceans,

you, infinitude of space.

How many far places were once

within me. Some winds

are like my own child.

When I breathe them now, do they know me again?

Air, you silken surround,

completion and seed of my word.

--Rilke

There isn't any

It is lovely when there is no next thing.

You are simply doing this

and there is no next thing.

You are not thinking

as soon as I get this finished

I can get started on the next

because there isn't any.

There is simply this.

You are doing it now.

And it is lovely.

--Pat Ingoldsby

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