Poet's Corner

[Sky Dancer]

WALKING MEDITATION

Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.
We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.
Walk peacefully.
Walk happily.
Our walk is a peace walk.
Our walk is a happiness walk.

Then we learn
that there is no peace walk;
that peace is the walk;
that there is no happiness walk;
that happiness is the walk.
We walk for ourselves.
We walk for everyone
always hand in hand.

Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom under our feet.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Print on Earth your love and happiness.

Earth will be safe
when we feel in us enough safety.


Thich Nhat Hanh,




- Thich Nhat Hanh

 

[Sky Dancer]

Interrelationship

You are me, and I am you.
Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"?
You cultivate the flower in yourself,
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself,
so that you will not have to suffer.

I support you;
you support me.
I am in this world to offer you peace;
you are in this world to bring me joy

~Thich Nhat Hanh~

 

[Inferno]

Long be the miles that I have walked in revolution.
Soft are the steps that I have taken in the name of peace.
Sturdy are the bridges that these hands have built in the name of freedom.
Lost are the causes that we have tossed aside.

Long are the miles that I have run in the dark.
Soft are the footfalls on the path toward right.
Sturdy are the walls that will not fall down.
Lost are the causes that have never been run.

Meacham

 

[Sky Dancer]

Excellent poem, Inferno. Thanks so much. I buried one of mine in here many pages back.

 

[midcan5]

'Interstate Highway'

for our daughter, Lisa

"As on a crowded Interstate the drivers in boredom
or irritation speed ahead or lag (taken with sudden
enthusiasms for seventy-five), surging ahead a little by
weaving between lanes but still

staying pretty much even, so too the seeker in language
ranges ahead and behind--exiting and rejoining
a rushing multitude so closely linked that,
if seen from above, from the height

of the jet now descending, we present one
stasis of lights: feeling our freedom though
when seen from above, in the deepening twilight,
the pattern we bead is constant.

So we have traveled in time, lying down and waking
together, moved illusions, each cubicle with
tables and chairs, beds where our cries arose
lost in the surging engines.

Yet the roomlight where we made our love
still cubes us in amber. Out of the averaging
likeness, Pavlovian salivation at the bell
of a nipple, our lives extract their

time-thread, our gospel-truth. While Holiday
Inn and Exxon populate the stretch
between Washington and Richmond with lights,
I rewrite our pasts in this present:

recalling your waking, dear wife, to find
a nipple rosier, we not yet thinking a child
though impossibly guessing her features
the feathery, minutely combed lashes

the tiny perfect nails, though not yet
the many later trees at Christmas. Now
I know only backwardly, inscribing these sign-
ings that fade as the ink dries.

Remembering the graphlike beading of darkness,
I recall the ways that time once gave us--
distracted by signs for meals and clothing,
travelers, heavy with ourselves

defining the gift that bodies carry,
lighting the one, inner room, womb for
our daughter. Seeing from above, I read
this love our child embodies."

by James Applewhite

 

[Sky Dancer]

My name is Judith, meaning
She Who Is Praised
I do not want to be called praised
I want to be called The Power of Love.

if Love means protect then whenever I do not
defend you
I cannot call my name Love.
if Love means rebirth then when I see us
dead on our feet
I cannot call my name Love.
if Love means provide & I cannot
provide for you
why would you call my name Love?

do not mistake my breasts
for mounds of potatoes
or my belly for a great roast duck.
do not take my lips for a streak of luck
nor my neck for an appletree,
do not believe my eyes are a warm swarm of bees;
do not get Love mixed up with me.

Don't misunderstand my hands
for a church with a steeple,
open the fingers & out come the people;
nor take my feet to be acres of solid brown earth,
or anything else of infinite worth
to you, my brawny turtledove;
do not get me mixed up with Love.

not until we have ground we call our own
to stand on
& weapons of our own in hand
& some kind of friends around us
will anyone ever call our name Love,
& then when we do we will all call ourselves
grand, muscley names:
the Protection of Love,
the Provision of Love & the
Power of Love.
until then, my sweethearts,
let us speak simply of
romance, which is so much
easier and so much less
than any of us deserve.

~Judy Grahn~

 

[Sky Dancer]

May everyone wake up
into the natural state.
May everyone wash themselves
of disturbing emotions, karma,
wrong views, and compulsive habits.
May everyone wear the
bodhisattva's attire,
the transcendent disciplines.
May everyone sweep their house clean
of all doubts and distractions.
May eveyone have nourishing food
and delight in the taste of samadhi.
May eveyone have the leisure to sit
and rest imperturbably.
May everyone walk on the
traceless path of natural freedom.
May everyone be able to see
with the vision of the way
things abide.
May everyone always hear
the sounds of suchness.
May everyone understand
the magic of their thoughts.
May everyone act skillfully
with loving kindness.
May everyone speak skillfully
with loving kindnesss.

Lama Drimed, from the book of poems, RAINDROPS FOR THE LOVE OF IT

 

[Sky Dancer]

Cartographies of Silence


1.

A conversation begins
with a lie. and each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature

A poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own

false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.


2.

The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering
the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word


3.

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint of a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence


4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?


5.

The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan

Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words

stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.


6.

The scream
of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others


7.

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare


8.

No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child's fingers

or the newborn infant's mouth
violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

Adrienne Rich

 

[Sky Dancer]

Living in Sin


She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own---
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

Adrienne Rich

 

[Sky Dancer]

Burning Oneself Out


We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,

the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core

the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes.
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin

Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain

You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,

that print, that rock,
the sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this

or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down

feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire

Adrienne Rich

 

[midcan5]

'A Story About the Body'

"The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl -- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees."

Robert Haas

 

[Sky Dancer]

She, she who? she WHO? she, WHO SHE? . . .
She SHE who, She, she SHE
she SHE, she SHE who
SHEEE WHOOOOOO

She Who increases
what can be done

I shall grow another breast
in the middle of my chest . . .
slippery as a school of fish
sounder than stone. Call it
She – Who – educates – my -- chest.

am the wall at the lip of the water
I am the rock that refused to be battered
I am the dyke in the matter, the other
I am the wall with the womanly swagger
And I have been many a wicked grandmother
and I shall be many a wicked daughter.

~Judy Grahn~

 

[midcan5]

thanks

I buy the paper thanks
a bagel and a thanks
some coffee thanks
a held door thanks
a right of way thanks
elevator arm thanks
a reply thanks
I devise a test
I ask
no thanks
contribute
no thanks
some time
no thanks
ah I got it
thanks is
incomplete.

 

[midcan5]

'The Search Party'

"I wondered if the others felt
as heroic
as safe: my unmangled family
slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead
behind my flashlight’s beam.
Stones, thick roots as twisted as
a ruined body,
what did I fear?
I hoped my batteries
had eight more lives
than the lost child.
I feared I’d find something.

Reader, by now you must be sure
you know just where we are,
deep in symbolic woods.
Irony, self-accusation,
someone else’s suffering.
The search is that of art.

You’re wrong, though it’s
an intelligent mistake.
There was a real lost child.
I don’t want to swaddle it
in metaphor.
I’m just a journalist
who can’t believe in objectivity.
I’m in these poems
because I’m in my life.
But I digress.
A man four volunteers
to the left of me
made the discovery.

We circled in like waves
returning to the parent shock.
You’ve read this far, you might as well
have been there too. Your eyes accuse
me of false chase. Come off it,
you’re the one who thought it wouldn’t
matter what we found.
Though we came with lights
and tongues thick in our heads,
the issue was a human life.
The child was still
alive. Admit you’re glad."


William Matthews

 

[midcan5]

'The Rain'

"All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent -
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be, for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness."


Robert Creeley

 

[Sky Dancer]

A Word to Husbands

by Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

 

[Sky Dancer]

As Soon as Fred Gets Out of Bed

by Jack Prelutsky

As soon as Fred gets out of bed,
his underwear goes on his head.
His mother laughs, "Don't put it there,
a head's no place for underwear!"
But near his ears, above his brains,
is where Fred's underwear remains.

At night when Fred goes back to bed,
he deftly plucks it off his head.
His mother switches off the light
and softly croons, "Good night! Good night!"
And then, for reasons no one knows,
Fred's underwear goes on his toes.

 

[Sky Dancer]

Touched by An Angel

by Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

 

[midcan5]

'For My Daughter'

"When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together."

David Ignatow

 

[Sky Dancer]

The Crazy Woman

by Gwendolyn Brooks

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I'll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I'll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."