Sometimes things don't go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, the vine

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,

sometimes someone aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect someone honest, decide they care

enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.

Some people become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

-- Sheenagh Pugh

from “Selected Poems”, 1990

Brooding

Winter,

rising from mature darkness,

offers its faithful bidding

for brooding reflection…

a time to pause

for deep stories to find my lips,

a time to gather

around a hearth of friendship,

a time to surrender,

fully exposed,

to the north light of winter.

Curiously,

I find myself longing

for this blackness of Solstice,

for the peace it brings.

I am raw with musing,

searching deep understandings;

my life’s autumn is complete,

like a last chapter’s page

damp with ink,

drying…

ready to turn for the next.

What shards of light

are found in darkness?

What stunning stories

will a final season bring?

l sigh into deep pause,

I quiet…

my soul waits to be heard,

as I draw in replenishment

with brooding renewal,

taking in this clean, pristine

breath of my winter.

--Marilyn Loy Every, from Tending the Heart

Blackberries

In the early morning an old woman

is picking blackberries in the shade.

It will be too hot later

but right now there's dew.

Some berries fall: those are for squirrels.

Some are unripe, reserved for bears.

Some go into the metal bowl.

Those are for you, so you may taste them

just for a moment.

That's good times: one little sweetness

after another, then quickly gone.

Once, this old woman

I'm conjuring up for you

would have been my grandmother.

Today it's me.

Years from now it might be you,

if you're quite lucky.

The hands reaching in

among the leaves and spines

were once my mother's.

I've passed them on.

Decades ahead, you'll study your own

temporary hands, and you'll remember.

Don't cry, this is what happens.

Look! The steel bowl

is almost full. Enough for all of us.

The blackberries gleam like glass,

like the glass ornaments

we hang on trees in December

to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.

Some berries occur in sun,

but they are smaller.

It's as I always told you:

the best ones grow in shadow.

--Margaret Atwood

When I Am Among The Trees

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”

--Mary Oliver

I Am Standing

I am standing

on the dunes

in the heat of summer

and I am listening

to mockingbird again

who is tonguing

his embellishments

and, in the distance,

the shy

weed loving sparrow

who has but one

soft song

which he sings

again and again

and something

somewhere inside

my own unmusical self

begins humming:

thanks for the beauty of the world.

Thanks for my life.

--Mary Oliver

Antidotes to fear of death

Sometimes as an antidote

To fear of death,

I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,

I suck them from the quenching dark

Til they are all, all inside me,

Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself

Into a universe still young,

Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,

The light of all the not yet stars

Drifting like a bright mist,

And all of us, and everything

Already there

But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough

To lie down here on earth

Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields

Of our discarded skulls,

Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,

Thinking: whatever left these husks

Flew off on bright wings.

--Rebecca Elson

One Day I Decided

One day I decided to not grow any older

lots of luck I said to myself

(my joking self)        then I looked up at the sky

which is wide       its blueness    its whiteness

low on my left    the steamy sun rose    moved

I placed my hand against it    my whole hand

which is broad from pinky to thumb   no   my

two hands   I bared my teeth to it    my teeth

are strong   secure on their gold posts   I breathed

deeply   I held my breath    I stood on my toes    ah

then I was taller   still the clouds sailed

through me   around me    it’s true    I’m just

like them   summertime water that the sun

sips and spits into this guzzling earth

Grace Paley (2000)

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found 

a hedgehog jammed up against the blades,

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

--Philip Larkin

Winter Morning

When I can no longer say thank you

for this new day and the waking into it,

for the cold scrape of the kitchen chair

and the ticking of the space heater glowing

orange as it warms the floor near my feet,

I know it’s because I’ve been fooled again

by the selfish, unruly man who lives in me

and believes he deserves only safety

and comfort. But if I pause as I do now,

and watch the streetlights outside flashing

off one by one like old men blinking their

cloudy eyes, if I listen to my tired neighbors

slamming car doors hard against the morning

and see the steaming coffee in their mugs

kissing chapped lips as they sip and

exhale each of their worries white into

the icy air around their faces—then I can

remember this one life is a gift each of us

was handed and told to open: Untie the bow

and tear off the paper, look inside

and be grateful for whatever you find

even if it is only the scent of a tangerine

that lingers on the fingers long after

you’ve finished peeling it.

--James Crews

Notes on survival

You are allowed to break. Everything does.

The stars grow tired and fall.

The waves crash against rocks and shores.

Trees fall for both storms and the wind, leaving behind seeds

and saplings so a version of them can grow again.

Stormclouds part for the rain

and then part again for the sun to come through.

Night must break for the day and the day for the night.

The world is made of broken things piecing themselves back together

--this is what gives us the most resilient stories.

So why do you think that you were built any differently 

than the night and the stormclouds? 

You know how to put yourself back together again too,

just as well as they do.

Take heart. You have managed to rebuild yourself 

a thousand times over from every bad day.

That is no small thing.

--Nikita Gill

 “The only way to bury the past so that it will stay buried is to regard it with gratitude; otherwise it will come back to haunt us. Hatred binds us, gratitude frees us. And doubt is a form of self-hatred. Don’t doubt yourself. Regard your past with gratitude and give it a decent burial.”

—Kaz Iwaasa

November

Is there anything left to be said

about the blaze of autumn leaves --

the way they let go with such graciousness,

how they dance on the wind

and crunch under the feet and glow

in the afternoon light?

Maybe just this:

The colours fade. They turn sodden as

milky cereal in the gutters and sidewalk.

The trees look tattered, and then

vulnerable and exposed. It turns out 

that loss is really loss. Which is every bit

as much a part of the story as 

autumn's glamour. Listen.

You are not obliged to be beautiful.

You don't have to shine.

Blooming will happen when it happens.

If you can be still for a moment.

you might notice that

the roots that feed you

are still reaching silently through the dark. 

--Lynn Ungar November 18, 2020

Look out

your window.

Every falling 

autumn leaf 

is a tiny kite 

with a string 

too small to see

held by the part 

of you in charge 

of making beauty 

out of grief.

--Andrea Gibson

Hope

To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

-- Rebecca Solnit

Do not be distracted

Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time. Do not be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.

-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Time machine

Regret

is a time machine 

to the past.

Worry 

is a time machine 

to the future. 

Gratitude 

is a time machine 

to the present.

No one books

my travel for me.

I decide where

I want to go.

--Andrea Gibson 

The boundary between us and the rest of the world is so fluid. So I think of myself as a song the universe is singing.

-- Rebecca Henderson 

Something Like This, Anyway

If I prayed, which I don’t, 

then we could say that I asked 

god to open every door that I 

had shut, every door I did not 

know was there. 

Why I asked this, well, 

this will make sense to you 

or it won’t, but every closed 

door I was aware of 

had became a point of suffering. 

And with every open door, 

I could feel congruence, 

the world rushing in to create 

more space in me. 

And god said to me, though 

we could not say that it was a voice, 

god said, Open even the door with people jeering 

on the other side, their faces twisted 

in hate? Even the door to an entire 

forest of sorrow? And because 

this conversation was not really 

happening, we could not say that 

I said yes to the questions, but 

we could say, perhaps, that 

the yes began to root in me 

and it was not so much a matter 

of someone opening the doors 

but that the doors more or less 

dissolved. And what I had thought 

could separate me from anything else 

was shown to be nothing at all. 

I would like to tell you that I felt grace 

in the opening, but the truth

is I felt such terrible ache. 

And god did not come put a hand 

on my cheek and tell me 

everything would be okay. 

In fact, if anything, the voice 

I did not hear told me 

there are no promises. 

But I felt it, the invitation 

to keep opening doors, 

to not close my eyes, 

to not turn away. 

And though I do not pray, 

I said thank you, thank you. 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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