reverence

In order to become attentive to beauty, we need to rediscover the art of reverence. Our world seems to have lost all sense of reverence. We seldom even use the word any more. The notion of reverence is full of riches that we now need desperately. Put simply, it is appropriate that a human being should dwell on this earth with reverence.

-– John O’Donohue

waves

When the waves close over me, I dive down to fish for pearls.

--Masha Kaleko

in passing

how swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost and become precious

--Lisel Mueller

Death poems

Kiba, 1868, ae. 90

My old body:
a drop of dew
grown heavy at the leaf tip


Joseki, 1779, ae. 85

This must be
my birthday
there
in paradise


Ensei, 1725, ae. 69

A parting gift to my body:
just when it wishes
I'll breathe my last.


Fukaku, 1753, ae. 92

Empty cicada shell:
as we come
we go back naked


Kin'u, 1817, ae. 62

How leisurely
the cherry blossoms
bloom this year
unhurried
by their doom


Renseki, 1789, ae. 88

I cleansed the mirror of my heart
now it reflects the moon


Yamazaki Sokan, ~1540

Should someone ask where Sokan went,
just say,
he had some business in the other world


Kyoriku, 1715, ae. 59

Till now I thought that death
befell the untalented alone.
If those with talent, too, must die,
surely they make
a better manure?


Zosan Junku, 1308, ae. 76

You must play the tune of non-being yourself--
nine summits collapse, eight oceans go dry.


Inseki, 1765, ae. 67

I give my name back
as I step in
this Eden of flowers.


Toko, 1795, ae. 86

Death poems
are mere delusion:
death is death.


Japanese Death poems, Yoel Hoffman, Tuttle Publishing.
(It was traditional for Zen masters to compose poems as they were dying.)

poems written on retreat

Walking in wet grass:
a million rainbows
quiver
at my feet.

----------

Beneath the cherry boughs
upturned faces
blossom.

----------

this breath
a thread:
the fabric
my life.

St Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

--Galway Kinnell