Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.
Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.
I pledge allegiance
I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
“Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.”
—Aldous Huxley, Island
If this were the last time we met in this world
what would I wish I had said or done?
I know death is always somewhere in the neighborhood
for someone as old as I,
just as I know, no matter how much I might beg,
God would never forbid you might die.
There is no perfect word to speak,
no perfect deed to perform.
When after today I have left or am left,
if I am never to see you again,
then I just want to be fully here now,
to be fully awake while we may.
There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream, and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in—
the wild with the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.
All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman's silence
receiving the river's grace,
the gardner's musing on rows.
I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.
Since he was a baby
I have awakened in the night
startled
by the bell-sweet sound
of his laugh.
I am propelled,
cold, knees creaking,
across the cluttered floor
to his bed,
my face above his face:
yes, he is asleep,
and smiling.
Back in my bed I hear again
his high warble.
How I envy this boy
who is not mine,
who was never mine.
How I praise him
for making everything in the world right
for one moment.
chances are we will sink quietly back
into oblivion without a ripple
we will go back into the face
down through the mortars as though it hadn’t happened
earth: I’ll remember you
you were the mother you made pain
I’ll grind my thorax against you for the last time
and put my hand on you again to comfort you
sky: could we forget?
we were the same as you were
we couldn’t wait to get back sleeping
we’d have done anything to be sleeping
and trees angels for being thrust up here
and stones for cracking in my bare hands
because you foreknew
there was no vengeance for being here
when we were flesh we were eaten
when we were metal we were burned back
there was no death anywhere but now
when we were men when we became it
"Clay Out of Silence" by C. K. Williams. Text as published in Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Hear the poet read this poem here.
Curator's note: We mark the passing of another mindfulness poet. The award-winning C. K. Williams, whose writing expressed strong social conscience, died September 20th at the age of 78 from multiple myeloma. In an interview with PBS Newhour in 2000, Williams described the writing process as "a kind of fusion of will and submission and inspiration that’s quite marvelous, where something sometimes will—at its very best—seem to be happening through you and to you, rather than you making it happen."
simmers on the kitchen stove.
All afternoon dense kernels
surrender to the fertile
juices, their tender bellies
swelling with delight.
In the yard we plant
rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes,
cupping wet earth over tubers,
our labor the germ
of later sustenance and renewal.
Across the field the sound of a baby crying
as we carry in the last carrots,
whorls of butter lettuce,
a basket of red potatoes.
I want to remember us this way—
late September sun streaming through
the window, bread loaves and golden
bunches of grapes on the table,
spoonfuls of hot soup rising
to our lips, filling us
with what endures.
This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.
I sit on my coat
and think about home:
the warm cosy glow of the fire,
the smell of home baked bread…
I brush tears to the grass.
A small child wanders over,
sits down with a bump.
I glance at him,
and he gazes at me intently.
A sharp, blue gaze,
I offer him a piece of bread
and he takes it. A flicker of a smile.
I put my arm around his skinny shoulders.
Silently, together, we sit, and think, and cry.
Curator's note: Unable to sleep, I prepared this post in the middle of the night. Surely there is something more each of us can do, right where we are, to respond with kindness and courage during this massive outpouring of refugees from war-torn Syria. (And they, of course, aren't the only refugees in the world who are suffering....)
There is always
that edge of doubt.
Trust it.
That's where
the new things come from. If
you can't live with it,
get out because,
when it's gone
you're on automatic,
repeating something
you've learned.
Let your prayer be:
save me from that tempting
certainty that
leads me back
from the edge,
that dark edge where
the first light breaks.
"The Edge of Doubt" by Albert Huffstickler. Text as published in Journal for Anthroposophy(Fall, 1994).
Curator's note: This is an update to today's post, which presented the poem with very different line breaks and capitalization. I had been unable to locate a source for that earlier version. My thanks to subscriber Julie Roehm for providing a source citation so I could track down this text.
Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.
Every morning I pull over to the curb
and your laughing pansies climb in, until the car is full.
Open wide, they press bright pink faces and soft green leaves
against the windows—waving to drivers, flashing smiles
at leggy joggers, winking at the traffic cop. A bunch of them
always beg for oldies, so I switch off the news. We rock
and bop and doo-wop-wop across the Hennepin Avenue bridge.
At the ramp, the voice in the box—Take the Ticket Now, Please—
gives them the giggles. I step out of the car, surrounded
by this cloud of flowers. We take the stairs two at a time,
John grins when he hands me the mail, and Ann,
downing coffee in the lounge, perks up enough
to think of the joke she had forgotten the day before.
I won’t lie to you. Every moment is not smooth sailing.
Sometimes the trucks pass way too close. We sway,
shake our heads, drop a few petals. And some days
are just too much for us. We close up early, exhausted.
People tell me that in these parts, the frost sets fast.
I say winter will come when it does, but for now
I travel with a car full of blossoms. Thank you
for tending them from end to end of that strip
that elsewhere fills with weeds and rubble,
for lending them to passersby!
"To the Owners of the Bungalow at 304 University Ave. NE" by Karen Kraco. Text as published in the "Minnesota Poetry Calendar 2001." Presented here by poet submission.
I am forever grateful to my mother
for prayers she uttered alongside
our breakfront, for the yearly
metamorphosis of this
bulky red-brown furniture
into ark and tabernacle.
I am grateful for how she
helped blessings rain down
on its contents, a hardcover
War and Peace no one read,
a chrome serving tray
meant for show,
a miniature torah scroll from
one of the bar-mitzvah cakes,
all visible behind the glass,
baseball card sets, a shoebox
full of family photos stored below,
behind one of its doors,
linen tablecloths and expensive
silverware kept in the drawers.
I am thankful for how she dovined*
before this tall, unsecured
ceilingscraper on the High Holy Days,
how it shook when she rocked
back and forth in awe, how
in a housedress, she turned
a circle of spotless living room
carpet into sacred ground
*Rocking back and forth in prayer
"Breakfront" by Robert Rosenbloom. Text as posted on Your Daily Poem (11/15/2014).
Curator's note: I offer this poem to mark the Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah, which begins this evening. My thanks to Rabbi Jill Zimmerman of the Jewish Mindfulness Network for both helping me understand this poem better and recommending the companion art. Art credit: "A Jewish woman praying," image by unknown photographer.
She tips the scales
at one ounce
before she migrates, taking off
from the seacoast to our east
flying higher and higher
ascending two or three miles
during her eighty hours of flight
until she lands,
in Tobago,
north of Venezuela
three days older,
and weighing half as much.
She flies over open ocean almost the whole way.
Oh she is not so different from us.
The arc of our lives is a mystery too.
We do not understand,
we cannot see
what guides us on our way:
that longing that pulls us toward light.
Not knowing, we fly onward
hearing the dull roar of the waves below.
My hands lift high a bowl of rice, the seeds harvested
in the field where my grandmother was laid to rest.
Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby
from the grandmother I never knew.
I imagine her soft face as they laid her down into the earth,
her clothes battered, her skin stuck to her bones;
in the great hunger of 1945, my village
was hungry for graves to bury all the dead.
Nobody could find my grandmother’s grave,
so my father tasted bitter rice for sixty-five years.
After sixty-five years, my father and I stood
in front of my grandmother’s grave.
I heard my father call “Mum,” for the first time;
the rice field behind his back trembled.
----
My two feet cling to the mud.
I listen in the burning incense to my grandmother’s soul spread;
uniting deep with the earth, taking root in the field,
she quietly sings lullabies, calling rice plants to blossom.
Lifting the bowl of rice in my hands, I count every seed,
each one glistening with the sweat of my relatives,
their backs bent in the rice fields,
the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
LET me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times. May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of the quiet river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years. Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit. Though the world know me not, may my thoughts and actions be such as shall keep me friendly with myself. Lift my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses of the stars. Forbid that I should judge others, lest I condemn myself. Let me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path. Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am; and keep ever burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope. And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life, and for time's olden memories that are good and sweet; and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still.
"A Prayer" by Max Ehrmann. Text as published in The Poems of Max Ehrmann (Dodge Publishing Company, 1906).
Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.
Let us praise good workers (you know who you are)
Who come gladly to the job and do what you can
For as long as it takes to repair the car
Or clean the house—the woman or man
Who dives in and works steadily straight through,
Not lagging and letting others carry the freight,
Who joke around but do what you need to do,
Like the home caregiver who comes daily at eight
A.m. to wash and dress the man in the wheelchair
And bring him meals and put him to bed at night
For minimum wage and stroke his pale brown hair.
He needs you. "Are you all right?" "I'm, all right,"
He says. He needs you to give him these good days,
You good worker. God's own angels sing your praise.
I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation.
Of course, at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am.
"The Neighbors" by Jack Ridl. Text as published in Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press, 2013). © Wayne State University Press. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
