Zelda: "Each of Us Has A Name"

Each of us has a name
given by God
and given by our parents
Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear
Each of us has a name
given by the mountains
and given by our walls
Each of us has a name
given by the stars
and given by our neighbors
Each of us has a name
given by our sins
and given by our longing
Each of us has a name
given by our enemies
and given by our love
Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations
and given by our work
Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness
Each of us has a name
given by the sea
and given by
our death.

"Each of Us Has A Name" by Zelda (Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky), from The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems, translated from the original Hebrew by Marcia Lee Falk (Hebrew Union College Press, 2004). Text as published by Ritualwell: Tradition & Innovation.

My thanks to Rabbi Shmuel Birnham for suggesting this poem. 

Art credit: "Faces from around the world," video published on January 26, 2014, by jarray42. Soundtrack: "The Time To Run," by Dexter Britain.

Jane Hirshfield: "Rebus"

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?



"Rebus" by Jane Hirshfield. Text as published in Given Salt, Given Sugar (Harper Perennial, 2002).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Octavio Paz: "Brotherhood"

Homage to Claudius Ptolemy


I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.


 
"Brotherhood" by Octavio Paz. Text as published in Octavio Paz: Collected Poems, 1957-1987, edited and translated from the original Spanish by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 1991).

Art credit: "Admiring the Galaxy," photograph taken on May 20, 2013, by European Southern Observatory / Alan Fitzsimmons. From the caption: "This image is a self portrait taken by astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons ... at ESO’s La Silla Observatory [located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile]."

Lao Tzu: "We Are a River"

Our life has not been an ascent
up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.

                                      *

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.

"We Are a River," from The Sage's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for the Second Half of Life, William Martin's free-verse interpretation of the classic work by Lao Tzu (The Experiment, 2010).

Art credit: Untitled photograph from Autumn River, a series by Philip Brittan in which he "submerges himself and his camera in the currents of Bristol’s River Frome, capturing the movements of fallen leaves." See more of his remarkable series here. 

Margaret Gibson: "Heaven"

The leaves are turning, one by one carried away in the crisp wind.
In one letter he penned,
Coleridge turned away, calling love
a local anguish he meant to leave
behind him. Away, away,
says the blue and gold day, and no one hears it but the wind, whose law
it echoes. The dog has a red ball to chase.
You pick a flat, perfect stone for the wall you hope to live long enough
to rebuild. I prune
briars, pick burrs from the dog's fur.
I teach Come and Sit. Sit here—
a longer sit beneath the cedars. The grass is freshly cut,
sun low, all the energy
of a summer's day rushing into bulb and root.
The dog runs off, returns. The stones balance
steeply. Good work. Good dog. This is
heaven. Sit. Stay.

"Heaven" by Margaret Gibson. Text as published in Broken Cup: Poems (Louisiana University Press, 2013). © Margaret Gibson. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Focused," photograph taken on May 10, 2014, by Kristen Fletcher Photography.

Linda Buckmaster: "Flowering"

At the ruins of the Seven Churches Inishmore

Pick a crevice,
a homey gap
between stones
and make it
your own.

Grow a life here
from wind
rain
and the memories of ancients
embedded in limestone.

The bees will use you
for their sweet honey.
The rock will soften under
your touch.
You will draw moisture from fog
and hold it.
Your presence
will build soil.

This is all we have
in this life
all we own:
a flowering
an opening
a gap between stones
for tiny tender roots.

"Flowering" by Linda Buckmaster, from Heart Song & Other Legacies: Poems (The Illuminated Sea Press, 2006). Text as published in UUWorld (Spring, 2006).

Art credit: Untitled photograph by Monopoly Traveler.

Jack Myers: "Fragment"

Remember when you were little
and could shout like the yellow sun
on the horizon Here I Come!,
before your self-image was a light bulb
in the fridge of your self-esteem
and you weren't afraid of anything in life
because there wasn't any difference
between everything in life and you?
Remember how large you felt?

"Fragment" by Jack Myers. Source unknown. Text as published on a card the curator received in late September from subscriber Barbara Regenspan.

Curator's note: This poem is likely by the late Jack Elliott Myers, one-time poet laureate of Texas, who was quite prolific. If anyone knows the specific source for this poem, please let me know. Update 2/12/20: Thank you to Mary Rose Dougherty for informing the curator that Jack Myers wrote this poem in 2002 but never published it in a book. A colleague, Mark Cox, found it in the poet's files after his death from cancer in 2009.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Donna Hilbert: "In Plowboy's Produce Market"

I push my cart through Plowboy’s produce market

gleaning this song for the first days of fall:

broccoli cauliflower cabbage kohlrabi

The price of red pepper is dropping.

Eggplant shines purple.

Bell pepper is green.

I watch an old couple choose stringbeans:

she fills their sack by handfuls. He frowns,

empties the bag back into the bin,

then turns each bean to the light

before dropping it in.

pattypan crook-neck pumpkin zucchini

A woman wearing a scarf tight at her chin

eats Thompson’s seedless from the grape bin.

Tokay Exotic Muscat Red Flame

At the melons, a man in white shorts, skin brown

as russet potatoes, swings a cantaloupe into his cart.

I think I’m in love.

Winesap Pippin Golden Delicious

where last week there were plums.

Old man, kiss your wife.

Wash your face in the juice of ripe fruit.

Put beans into your sack without looking.

Old man, we’re in Plowboy’s—

every bean is perfect, every bean is right.

 "In Plowboy's Produce Market" by Donna Hilbert. Text as published in Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Pearl Editions, 2004). © Donna Hilbert. Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Poet photograph: Sandra Chandler.

Denise Levertov: "Sojourns in the Parallel World"

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension—though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it `Nature;' only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be `Nature' too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal—then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

—but we have changed, a little.

"Sojourns in the Parallel World" by Denise Levertov. Text as published in Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1998 edition).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Ryōkan: Untitled ["Before listening to the way"]

Before listening to the way, do not fail to wash your ears.
Otherwise it will be impossible to listen clearly.
What is washing your ears?
Do not hold on to your view.
If you cling to it even a little bit,
you will lose your way.
What is similar to you but wrong, you regard as right.
What is different from you but right, you regard as wrong.
You begin with ideas of right and wrong.
But the way is not so.
Seeking answers with closed ears is
like trying to touch the ocean bottom with a pole.

Untitled ["Before listening to the way"] by Ryōkan. Text as published in Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan, translated from the original Japanese by Kazuaki Tanahashi (Shambhala Publications, 2012). 

Art credit: "Remi Listening to the Sea," photograph by Edouard Boubat.

 

Edward Hirsch: "Fall"

Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.



"Fall" by Edward Hirsch. Text as published in Wild Gratitude (Knopf, 1986). © Edward Hirsch. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Lonely man standing in autumn forest," photograph by vitomirov.

William Stafford: "A Message from Space"

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna—a dish
aimed at stars—and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear—suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath—

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."



"A Message from Space" by William Stafford. Text as published in On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things, edited by Tom Andrews (University of Michigan Press, 1995).

Art credit: Untitled image presented by Wallpapers Library, photographer unknown.

Mary Oliver: "Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
   love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.



"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. Text as published in Dream Work (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).

Watch the poet read this poem.

Art credit: "Wild Geese in the Sunrise Sky," photograph by Christian Donges © 2008.

Michael Attie: "Mindful Loitering"

Park benches make the best Zendo.
Far superior to black cushions and blank walls.
This is what the heart looks like.
There are people passing through,
flocks of pigeons,
nannies with strollers,
old men sharing stories in the autumn air,
kids playing jump rope
and on their way to school,
Oak and Maple leaves raining on everyone.
I don’t know if I want to die of happiness
or sadness
or just fade away.
I look up.
Everyone is gone.
Time to move on
to the next park.
Find my heart again.

I’m the lazy poet
who needs to fall in love
in order to write anything.
It’s a crazy world—
there’s too much beauty
or not enough.
Either way,
the pain seems inescapable.

"Mindful Loitering" by Michael Attie. Text as published in This Smiling Heart (Neon Buddha Press, 1995). © 1995 Michael Attie. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Baby sitting on a bench in the park, surrounded by a lot of pigeons," photograph by artoflightpro.

Carolyn Locke: "What Else"

The way the trees empty themselves of leaves,
let drop their ponderous fruit,
the way the turtle abandons the sun-warmed log,
the way even the late-blooming aster
succumbs to the power of frost—

this is not a new story.
Still, on this morning, the hollowness
of the season startles, filling
the rooms of your house, filling the world
with impossible light, improbable hope.

And so, what else can you do
but let yourself be broken
and emptied? What else is there
but waiting in the autumn sun?

"What Else" by Carolyn Locke, from The Place We Become (forthcoming from Maine Authors Publishing, Spring, 2015). Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: Photograph from Foto Wikimedia Commons.

Malena Mörling: "See High Above"

      You step outside
into the early morning
            in autumn—

And at the exact same instant
      a scrap of paper
floats over—

             High in the blue
blustery library
      of the air—

You look up
             and you see it rushing
and lifting

      even higher
into the transparent layers
             of the sky—

And at once,
      you know
it is a message—

             A message
that there is no message.
      The scrap of paper

is just a scrap of paper!
             It is weightless
and free—

      The world is just
the world—
             And you are exactly

who you are—
      Also floating now
high inside

             the invisible
balloon of
      another moment.

"See High Above" by Malena Mörling. Text as published in Astoria (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.


 

Hafiz: "Now Is the Time"

Now is the time to know

That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

"Today" by Hafiz. From the Penguin publication The Gift: Poems of Hafiz. Copyright © 1999 Daniel Ladinsky and used with his permission.
 
Art credit: "Raking Leaves," photograph by Chris Brown Photography. 

Curator's note: Today's post is a collaboration with subscriber Chris Brown, who selected one of his photographs to accompany Hafiz's poem. Chris writes of his selection: "Doing simple things, like chopping wood, carrying water and raking leaves, nourishes sacredness." He also notes that the photograph is "a tongue-in-cheek misrepresentation" of his wife, "as she is an energizer bunny, and never stops moving. It was a challenge to get her to sit still long enough to make this picture. "

Grace Butcher: "Learning from Trees"

If we could,
like the trees,
practice dying,
do it every year
just as something we do—
like going on vacation
or celebrating birthdays,
it would become
as easy a part of us
as our hair or clothing.

Someone would show us how
to lie down and fade away
as if in deepest meditation,
and we would learn
about the fine dark emptiness,
both knowing it and not knowing it,
and coming back would be irrelevant.

Whatever it is the trees know
when they stand undone,
surprisingly intricate,
we need to know also
so we can allow
that last thing
to happen to us
as if it were only
any ordinary thing,

leaves and lives
falling away,
the spirit, complex,
waiting in the fine darkness
to learn which way
it will go.

"Learning from Trees" by Grace Butcher. Text as published in Child, House, World (Hiram Poetry Review Supplement No. 12, Hiram College, 1991). © Grace Butcher. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Untitled photograph by Pierre Pellegrini.

Poet photograph credit: Hale Chatfield (digitally altered by curator).

Tom Montag: "Lecturing My Daughter on Her First Fall Rain"

this then is fall rain.
i spoke of it

in july, telling you
rain has textures,

telling you july
rain drives deep for

dry roots, to fill them,
drives in at warm

angles, softly. i
told you then fall

rain is cold, rough as
wrought iron, sometimes,

bent as rusted nails.
you were content,

though, to wait, to learn
this rain by touch,

to measure your blue
fingers against

the still warm places
between rain-drops

on your surprised face.

"Lecturing My Daughter on Her First Fall Rain" by Tom Montag was first collected in Making Hay & Other Poems (Pentagram Press, 1975) and then again in Middle Ground (Midwestern Writers Publishing House, 1982). Since 1998 the poem has been incorporated into the design of a wall in the second floor east hallway of the Wisconsin Center (originally the Midwest Express Convention Center) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Reprinted here by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Untitled photograph by unnamed blogger at It's for the Baby: Mummy and Baby Blog.

Linda Hogan: "Journey"

The mouth of the river may be beautiful.
It doesn't remember the womb of its beginning.
It doesn't look back to where it's been
or wonder who ahead of it polished the rough stones.

It is following the way
in its fullness,
now like satin,
now cresting,
waters meeting, kindred
to travel gathered together,
all knowing it flows
one way, shining or in shadows.
And me, the animal
I ride wants to drive forward,
its longing not always my own,
overrunning its banks and bounds,
edgeless, spilling along the way

because, as I forget,
it knows everything
is before it.



"Journey" by Linda Hogan. Text as published in Rounding the Human Corners: Poems (Coffee House Press, 2008). © Linda Hogan. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Linda Hogan is the author of many works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, including The Book of Medicines: Poems.

Art credit: "Alatna River," photograph by Patrick J. Endres / AlaskaPhotoGraphics.com.

Denise Levertov: "Gloria"

Praise the wet snow
            falling early.
Praise the shadow
            my neighor's chimney casts on the tile roof
even this gray October day that should, they say,
have been golden.
                                 Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
       the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, which stays
our hand,
our murderous hand,
                                     and gives us
still,
in the shadow of death,
               our daily life,
               and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.



"Gloria" by Denise Levertov, an excerpt from Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus (William B. Ewert, 1981). Text as published in Selected Poems, edited by Paul Lacey (New Directions, 2003).

Art credit: "Chimney snow," photograph taken on March 15, 2011, by David Boyd.

 

Dennis Camire: "Encounter with Roofer"

When he drops his hammer for a noon sandwich

He’s like a Buddha atop a grand stuppa
As bare feet set over the eaves while he reads
Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Peace is Every Step.”

And thinking his earlier noise bad karma
For making my morning writing an uphill rhyme
I sherpa into the sacred space of his lunch break
And discover he’s read the whole of Kornfield

And, like me, practices that walking meditation
Where he imagines the soles of his feet
Massaging the vertebrae of mother earth’s
Tectonic plates. Now, sharing cool aid

And khoans, we’re like Tu fu and Li Po high
Atop some remote mountain peak shading
A river below eroding time and stone.
Later that afternoon, in the silence

Which announces the end of his work day,
I’ll climb a second time with the gift of a Hahn line
Decreeing “rainwater is the master bodhisattva.”
He’ll reply “those who say they know, don’t know;

Those who say they don’t know, know.”
And though we won’t exchange emails
To meet for a tea ceremony
Or to play our Tibetan bowls

As I help him throw the remaining shingles
Into the backed up truck below
Then gladly tie down the sliding ladder,
I know the leak of a future sadness has been sealed

"Encounter with Roofer" by Dennis Camire. © Dennis Camire. Presented here by poet submission. This poem was first published in Cardinal Flower, an online journal celebrating rural living in New England.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

John O'Donohue: "A Morning Offering"

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.



"A Morning Offering" by John O'Donohue. Text as published in To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (Doubleday, 2008).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: "Perhaps It Would Eventually Erode, But ... "

That rock that we
have been pushing up
the hill—that one

that keeps rolling back down
and we keep pushing
back up—what if

we stopped? We are not
Sisyphus. This rock
is not a punishment.

It’s something we’ve chosen
to push. Who knows why.
I look at all the names

we once carved into
its sedimentary sides.
How important

I thought they were,
those names. How
I’ve clung to labels,

who’s right, who’s wrong,
how I’ve cared about
who’s pushed harder

and who’s been slack.
Now all I want
is to let the rock

roll back to where it belongs,
which is wherever it lands,
and you and I could,

imagine!, walk unencumbered,
all the way to the top and
walk and walk and never stop

except to discover what
our hands might do
if for once they were no longer

pushing.



"Perhaps It Would Eventually Erode, But ... " by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. © Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Visit the poet's blog, where she posts a poem a day.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown artist.

Bronislaw Maj: "A Leaf"

A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among other leaves, no one saw
what I did. I am
the only one.



"A Leaf" by Bronislaw Maj, from A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz (Mariner Books, 1998). Translated from the original Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass.

Art credit: Untitled photograph from www.tophdgallery.com.

Hannah Stephenson: "Ancient Language"

If you stand at the edge of the forest
and stare into it
every tree at the edge will blow a little extra
oxygen toward you

It has been proven
Leaves have admitted it

The pines I have known
have been especially candid

One said
that all breath in this world
is roped together

that breathing is
the most ancient language

"Ancient Language" by Hannah Stephenson. Text as posted on the poet's blog (12/31/2013). © Hannah Stephenson. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Pine Forest, Landes, Frances," image by unknown photographer.