Once in a Poem
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experiences, which cried out.
Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to.
From And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Bergere
The barn burned down,
Now I can see the moon.
Rumi
Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment 

 when nothing happens, 

 no what-have-I-to-do-today-list 
 -
Maybe, for half a moment, the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be 

 slows to silence, 

 the white cotton curtains hanging still. by Marie Howe
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. by Mary Oliver, Dream Work

The Guest House
This being human is a guest-house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.
Chickpea to Cook
~Jalaluddin Rumi
(translated by Coleman Barks)
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it's being boiled.
"Why are you doing this to me?"
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
"Don't you try to jump out.
You think I'm torturing you.
I'm giving you flavor, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being.
"Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this."
Grace first. Sexual pleasure, then a boiling new life begins, and the Friend has something good to eat.
On Commitment
Until one is committed there is always hesitancy, 
 the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness, there is one elementary truth,
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Rumi
Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook,
"Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can't do this by myself.
"I'm like an elephant that dreams of gardens back in Hindustan and doesn't pay attention to his driver. You're my cook, my driver, my way into existence. I love your cooking."
The cook says,
"I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
"My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices, and boiled some more, and boiled once beyond that, and became your teacher.
by Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision,
Raising to one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings
And material assistance which no man could have dreamed
Would come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
by Goethe

Between Before and After
Between before and after, the unimagined moment expands and contracts.
In love, like the eye’s iris, with the light. by Tom Devine
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean
 the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
 the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
 who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down
 who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
 how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
 with your one wild and precious life?
By Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems
The Journey
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice -- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.
"Mend my life!" each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen
Go Among Trees and Sit Still
I go among trees and sit still.
branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save. by Mary Oliver
All my stirring becomes quiet

Around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
Where I left them, asleep like cattle…
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song. by Wendell
Berry from Sabbaths, 1987, North Point Press
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Wendell Berry
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The dogs of indecision
Cross and cross the field of vision.
A cloud, a buzzing fly
Distract the lover’s eye.
Until the heart has found
Its native piece of ground
The day withholds its light,
The eye must stray unlit.
Little Gidding
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
The ground’s the body’s bride,
Who will not be denied.
Not until all is given
Comes the thought of heaven.
When the mind’s an empty room
The clear days come. Wendell Berry
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Little Gidding is one of the Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Still Water
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. by W.B. Yeats
Between Going and Staying
Between going and staying the day wavers, 
 in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass, 
 rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall 
 into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye, 
 watching myself in its blank stare.
he moment scatters.
Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause.
by Octavio Paz
Hokusai Says
Hokusai says: Look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.
He says Look Forward to getting old.
He says keep changing, you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself as long as it's interesting.
He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn't matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn't matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn't matter if you sit at home and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
He says every one of us is a child, every one of us is ancient, every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.
He says everything is alive - shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength are life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.
He says don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you. by Roger Keyes

Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is 
 , you must lose things, 
 feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, 
 all this must go so you know 
 how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.
The Five Hindrances
You must see how this could be you, 
 how he too was someone who journeyed through the night and the simple breath
thing inside,
that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
like a shadow or a friend.
only kindness that raises its head it is I you have been looking for,
You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. with plans
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, 
 only kindness that ties your shoes 
 and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, 
 from the crowd of the world to say and then goes with you every where
by Naomi Shihab Nye
The desire for sense pleasure: pleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, bodily sensations, and mind states. Typically identified as an “If only . . .” seductive mentality. “When a pickpocket meets a saint, the pickpocket sees only the saint’s pockets.”
Aversion, hatred, anger and ill will. Has a burning, tight quality to it that we can’t escape. Fear, judgment and boredom can all be forms of aversion, because they are based upon our dislike of some aspect of experience.
Sloth and torpor. Includes laziness, dullness, lack of vitality, fogginess and sleepiness.
Restlessness can be the opposite of sloth and torpor. Agitation, nervousness, anxiety and worry.
The mind spins in circles or flops around like a fish out of water.
Doubt. Can be the most difficult because when we believe it and get caught by it, our practice stops cold and we become paralyzed. Could be doubts about ourselves, our capacities, doubt about our teachers, doubts about the practice (“Does this really work?”)
From: Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, The Path of Insight Meditation 
 by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, Shambhala Publications, 1987

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN 5 SHORT CHAPTERS
CHAPTER I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in
I am lost . . . I am helpless
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
CHAPTER II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out. for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. by Max Ehrmann, 1920s
CHAPTER III
I walk down the same street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
CHAPTER IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
CHAPTER V
I walk down another street. by Portia Nelson

Writing in the Dark
It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.
Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.
Fumble for the light, and you’ll be stark awake, but the vision will be fading, slipping out of reach.
You must have paper at hand, a felt-tip pen – ballpoints don’t always flow, pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing shameful in that much prudence: those are your tools.
Never mind about crossing your t’s dotting your i’s – but take care not to cover one word with the next. Practice will reveal how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other to keep each line clear of the text.
Keep writing in the dark: a record of the night, or words that pulled you from depths of unknowing, words that flew through your mind, strange birds crying their urgency with human voices, or opened as flowers of a tree that blooms only once in a lifetime: words that may have the power to make the sun rise again.
Denise Levertov
Love After Love
The time will come 
 when, with elation 
 you will greet yourself arriving 
 at your own door, in your own mirror 
 and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. 
 You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart 
 to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart. 
 Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, 
 peel your own image from the mirror. 
 Sit. Feast on your life.
by Derek Walcott
If I Had My Life to Live Over

I'd dare to make more mistakes next time.
I'd relax. I would limber up.
I would be sillier than I have been this trip.
I would take fewer things seriously.
I would take more chances.
I would take more trips.
I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers.
I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd 
 have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I'm one of those people who live sensibly 
 and sanely hour after hour, day after day.
Oh, I've had my moments and if I had it to do over 
 again, I'd have more of them. In fact, 
 I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments.
One after another, instead of living so many 
 years ahead of each day.
I've been one of those people who never go anywhere 
 without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat 
 and a parachute.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot 
 earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.
If I had it to do again, I would travel lighter next time.
I would go to more dances.
I would ride more merry-go-rounds.
I would pick more daisies.
by Nadine Stair (age 85) 
 from Condensed Chicken Soup for the Soul 
 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor
Hansen & Patty Hansen
The Well of Grief
Those who will not slip beneath 
 the still surface of the well of grief 
 turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe 
 will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown away by those who wished for something else. by David Whyte from Close to Home
Between Going and Staying
Between going and staying the day wavers, 
 in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay 
 where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive, 
 all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass, 
 rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
Ithaca the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall ghostly theater of reflections.
into a
I find myself in the middle of an eye, 
 watching myself in its blank stare.
he moment scatters.
Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause. by Octavio Paz

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path, if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter, if you do not carry them within your soul, if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when, with such pleasure, with such joy you will enter ports seen for the first time; stop at Phoenician markets, and purchase fine merchandise, mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony, and sensual perfumes of all kinds, as many sensual perfumes as you can; visit many Egyptian cities,
from The Cure at Troy
(from Seamus Heaney’s re-telling of the story of
Philoctetes)
Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured.
The innocent in gaols beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don't hope on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave
Faint Music
(excerpt)
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years; and to anchor at the island when you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way, not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what
Ithacas mean. by Constantine P. Cavafy (1911) of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term. Seamus Heaney

When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. by Robert Haas
In Praise of Self-Deprecation
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.
The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly live as they live and are glad of it.
The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun.
Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska (born 1923) of Poland won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Her poems have been translated (and published in book form) in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Czech,
Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian and other languages. They have also been published in many foreign anthologies of Polish poetry.
DO NOT BE ASHAMED
You will be walking some night in the comfortable dark of your yard and suddenly a great light will shine round about you, and behind you will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly that you were about to escape,

and that you are guilty: you misread the complex instructions, you are not a member, you lost your card or never had one.
And you will know that they have been there all along, their eyes on your letters and books, their hands in your pockets, their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful, they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed, reading the page they hold out to you, then such light as you have made in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them, only an inward clarity, unashamed, that they cannot reach.
Be ready.
When their light has picked you out and their questions are asked, say to them: "I am not ashamed."
A sure horizon will come around you.
The heron will begin his evening flight from the hilltop.
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language. Even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.
Ten Lamps
If ten lamps are present in one place,
Each differs in form from the other;
Rumi
by Wendell Berry
Yet you can’t distinguish whose radiance is whose
When you focus on the light.
In the field of spirit, there is no division;
No individuals exist.
Sweet is the oneness of the Friend with his friends.
Catch hold of the spirit.
Help this headstrong self disintegrate;
That beneath it you may discover unity,
Like a buried treasure. Rumi
I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And at other times I forget.
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

Stand still.
Stand still.
Juana Ramon Jimenez, I AM NOT I translated by Robert Bly
The trees before you and the bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is a place called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
David Wagoner
Even after all these years the sun doesn't say
"You owe me".
Look what happens!
The whole world lights up.
My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
I am only one of my many mouths and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because deaths note wants to climb over- but in the dark interval, reconciled,
They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful. Ranier Maria Rilke, Translated by Robert Bly
Today like every other day
We wake up empty and scared.
Don't open the door of your study
And begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of way to kneel
And kiss the earth.
Don’t go back to sleep.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Hafiz
Rumi

People are going back and forth across the door sill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Ring the bells that can still ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.
Rumi
Leonard Cohen
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte, from "Sweet Darkness"
For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river-
Unbearable pain becomes its own cure,
Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn into sighing;
In this way we learn how water can die into air,
When, after heavy rain, the storm clouds disperse, is it not that they’ve wept themselves clear to the end?
If you want to know the miracle, how wind can polish a mirror,
Look: the shining glass grows green in Spring.
It’s the rose’s unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see-
In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.
Ghalib
Earth teach me stillness as the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me suffering as the old stones suffer with memory.
Earth teach me humility as blossoms are humble with beginning.

Earth teach me caring as the mother who succors her young.
Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me limitation as the ant which crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me freedom as the eagle which soars in the sky.
Earth teach me resignation as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me generation as the seed which rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness as dry fields weep with rain.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And Trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
Summer grasses ---
All that remains of great soldiers’ imperial dreams
Basho
"Hope" is the thing with feathers - that perches in the soul - and sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
Dickinson
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
UTE Prayer and happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.
"Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me."
Live with such thoughts and you live in hate.
"Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me."
Abandon such thoughts, and live in love.
Buddha
Emily

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life--
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
William Stafford, “You Reading This, Be Ready”
Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble, breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries, imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today. Judyth Hill, “Wage Peace”
Let the Soul banish all that disturbs;
Let the Body that envelopes it be still,
And all the frettings of the Body,
And all that surrounds it.
Let Earth and Sea and Air be still
And Heaven itself.
And then let the Body think
Of the Spirit as streaming, pouring,
Rushing and shining into it from
All sides while it stands quiet.
Plotinus, 205
Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth, let’s not speak in any language, let’s stop for a second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden strangeness…
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead in winter and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.
The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
Pablo Neruda, “Extravagaria” translated by Alastair Reid
Please Call Me By My True Names
Do not say that I will depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive
Look deeply: I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch to be a tiny bird, with wings still so fragile learning to sing in my new nest to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower to be a jewel hiding itself in stone
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope, the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of the pond, and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the 12 year old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving
Li Po

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people, dying slowly in a forced labour camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills up the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. Thich Nhat Hahn, “Please Call Me by My True Names”
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life we have refused again and again until now.
Until now David Whyte, “Enough”
Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else
Grief”
Unconditional
Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.
David Whyte, “Well of

Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master Game;
To play it is purest delight –
To honor its form, true devotion. Jennifer Paine Welwood, “Unconditional”
Your acceptance of what IS takes you to a deeper level where your inner state as well as your sense of self no longer depend on the mind’s judgments of “good” or “bad.”
When you say “yes” to the “isness” of life, when you accept this moment as it is, you can feel a sense of spaciousness within you that is deeply peaceful;
On the surface, you may still be happy when it’s sunny and not so happy when it’s rainy; you may be happy at winning a million dollars and unhappy at losing all your possessions. Neither happiness nor unhappiness, however, go all that deep anymore. They are ripples on the surface of your Being. The background peace within you remains undisturbed regardless of the nature of the outside condition.
The “yes” to what IS reveals a dimension of depth within you that is dependent neither on external conditions nor on the internal conditions of constantly fluctuating thoughts and emotions.”
From Stillness Speaks, Eckhart Tolle
In the tug and pull of desire's grip I unravel
Tattered shreds of a once regal robe fall away
Nothing comes....nothing
I ride out the battle with time and breath time and breath time and breath
Acceptance breezes in (crafty sage that she is)
Wraps this heart in sumptuous golden silk
Warms this heart to a trusting stillness, then
Leaves a knowing kiss upon this slowly smoothing brow.
Emptiness where all is possible silence
Donna Sherman, "Acceptance" the place of unfoldment surrender where all sound is born stillness the birth of all movement
Empty us out of ourselves
Darkness the keeper of light mystery embracing bold faith
Empty us out of ourselves
Fear believing we are lost fear believing we are separate fear

forgetting that story is born of mystery
Empty us out of ourselves
Love returning me to my heart love returning you to yours love
We Have not Come to Take Prisoners
We have not come here to take prisoners
But to surrender ever more deeply to freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love. Run, my dear, from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings,
Run like hell, my dear, from anyone likely to put a sharp knife into the sacred, tender vision of your beautiful heart.
We have a duty to befriend those aspects of obedience that stand outside of our house all that is left to hold
Hearing the silence still in the arms of expansive breath here among the shards of earth may all the tears
Empty us out of ourselves.
Sherman, Ayin
Donna and shout to our reason
"oh please, oh please come out and play."
For we have not come here to take prisoners, or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and Light!
Hafiz, "The Gift"
My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
I am only one of my many mouths and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because deaths note wants to climb over- but in the dark interval, reconciled,
They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful. Ranier Maria Rilke, Translated by
Robert Bly

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
A cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
This is the best season of your life.
A Discipline
Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches
On every side, there is no other place
To turn.
Dawning in your veins
Is the light of the blast.
That will print your shadow on stone
In a last antic of despair
To survive you in the dark.
Man has put his history to sleep
In the engine of our doom.
It flies
Over his dreams in the night,
A blazing cocoon.
O gaze into the fire
And be consumed by man’s despair,
And be still, and wait, and then see
The world go on with the patient work
Of season, embroidering birdsong
Upon itself as for a wedding, and feel
Your heart set out in the morning
Like a young traveler, arguing the world
From the kiss of a pretty girl.
It is the time’s discipline to think
Of the death of all living, and yet live.
To Look at Any Thing
To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:
To look at this green and say,
'I have seen spring in these
Woods,' will not do-you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between the leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peace
– Wendell Berry
Wu-men

They issue from.
by John Moffitt
From Teaching With Fire
Clinging to one’s school and condemning others
Is the certain way to waste one’s learning.
Since all dharma teachings are good,
Those who cling to sectarianism
Degrade Buddhism and sever
Themselves from liberation.
- Milarepa, The One Hundred Thousand Songs
In My Two Hands
I hold my face in my two hands
No I am not crying
I hold my face in my two hands to keep my loneliness warm to cradle my hunger shelter my heart from the rain and the thunder
Two hands protecting
Two hands nourishing
Two hands preventing my soul from flying in anger.
I hold my face in my two hands
My hands cupped to catch what might fall from within me
Deeper than crying no, I am not crying
I am in my two hands.
------------------------
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote this poem when bombs were falling on his beloved Vietnam, and he had to take care of his anger in solitude.
A Spontaneous Poem
I am walking in the woods and everything is real more real you are as real to me as the birds, as my footsteps, as the rustling of the leaves and slowly, and suddenly the world is in my sight the world is intrusively real as if i do not know who i am or even if i am.
Rani from winter 2010 PAMF MBSR course

I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.
Narichira (850 AD)
It Felt Love
How did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its being,
Otherwise,
We all remain
Too frightened. Hafiz
Come, come, whoever you are
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come. Rumi (translate by Coleman Barks)
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower, or everything flowers, from within, of selfblessings 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 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 selfcurl 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 blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
~ Galway Kinnell touch
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
Winston Churchill
Billy Collins - Shoveling Snow With Buddha

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over a mountain of his bare, round shoulder, and leaning for a moment on his shovel before he drives the thin blade again deep into the glittering white snow. his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
Subject: The Writer's Almanac for
September 20, 2010
The Writer's Almanac for September 20, 2010 for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
Listen http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj
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In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
How to listen http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj
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How the Stars Came Down one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow, and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow as if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway you could back the car down easily and drive off into the vanities of the world with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side, me with my commentary and he inside his generous pocket of silence, until the hour is nearly noon and the snow is piled high all around us; then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table while you shuffle the deck. and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Night. How the stars came down arching over us, and the only name we had for them was shooting stars.
Why there were so many was anybody's guess.
My great grandmother thought the world was coming to an end when Haley's comet flared across the sky. I lay flat on my back and watched the night sky falling all around me and I wanted, more than anything, never to go home.
I did, of course. They put us campers into busses and drove us back to tenements, asphalt and streetlights in the city.
What I didn't know that night in my bedroll at Sherwood Forest Camp was that when I got home, home wasn't my real home any more.
I had a new home in my remembering and it was dark and safe and beautiful with shooting stars still falling all around.
"How the Stars Came Down" by Pat
Schneider, from Another River. (c) Amherst
Writers & Artists Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
.
.

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance.
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears.
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years 
 .
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Night. How the stars came down arching over us, and the only name we had for them was shooting stars.
Why there were so many was anybody's guess.
My great grandmother thought the world was coming to an end when Haley's comet flared across the sky. I lay flat on my back and watched the night sky falling all around me and I wanted, more than anything, never to go home.
I did, of course. They put us campers into busses and drove us back to tenements, asphalt and streetlights in the city.
What I didn't know that night in my bedroll at Sherwood Forest Camp was that when I got home, home wasn't my real home any more.
I had a new home in my remembering and it was dark and safe and beautiful with shooting stars still falling all around.
"How the Stars Came Down" by Pat
Schneider, from Another River. (c) Amherst
Writers & Artists Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.
Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil—
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
Theodore Roethke
Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will—
The right thing happens to the happy man.
The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.
God bless the roots!—Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.
Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.
Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,
And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.
Theodore Roethke

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A
BLACKBIRD
I
Among twenty snowy mountains, 
 The only moving thing 
 Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds, 
 Like a tree 
 In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman 
 Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird 
 Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer, 
 The beauty of inflections 
 Or the beauty of innuendoes, 
 The blackbird whistling 
 Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window 
 With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird 
 Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood 
 Traced in the shadow 
 An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam, 
 Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird 
 Walks around the feet 
 Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents 
 And lucid, inescapable rhythms; 
 But I know, too, 
 That the blackbird is involved 
 In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight, 
 It marked the edge 
 Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds 
 Flying in a green light, 
 Even the bawds of euphony 
 Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut 
 In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him, 
 In that he mistook 
 The shadow of his equipage 
 For

blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing 
 And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat 
 In the cedar-limbs.
(1917)
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR
I
The man bent over his guitar, 
 A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar, 
 You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are 
 Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must, 
 A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar 
 Of things exactly as they are."
II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero'd head, large eye 
 And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can 
 And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man 
 Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade 
 Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
III
Ah, but to play man number one, 
 To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board 
 And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door, 
 Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho, 
 To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue, 
 Jangling the metal of the strings...
IV
So that's life, then: things are they are? 
 It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string? 
 And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong, 
 And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then" things as they are, 
 This buzzing of the blue guitar.
V
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. 
 There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep. 
 There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare. 
 There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place 
 Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
VI
A tune beyond us as we are, 
 Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space, 
 Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place 
 As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way 
 The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew. 
 The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are, 
 A composing of senses of the guitar.
VII
It is the sun that shares our works. 
 The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun, 
 It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works 
 And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm? 
 And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good, 
 the immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful? 
 The strings are cold on the blue guitar.
VIII
The vivid, florid, turgid sky, 
 The drenching thunder rolling by,
The morning deluged still by night, 
 The clouds tumultuously bright
And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged 
 By gold antagonists in air--
I know my lazy, leaden twang 
 Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear. 
 I twang it out and leave it there.
IX
And the color, the overcast blue 
 Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult, 
 And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still string, 
 The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows 
 Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half 
 His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words, 
 The weather of his stage, himself.
X
Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell 
 And clap the hollows full of tin.
Throw papers in the streets, the wills 
 Of the dead, majestic in their seals.
And the beautiful trombones--behold 
 The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe, 
 A pagan in a varnished car.
Roll a drum upon the blue guitar. 
 Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,
"Here am I, my adversary, that 
 Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,
Yet with a petty misery 
 At heart, a petty misery,
Ever the prelude to your end, 
 The touch that topples men and rock."
XI
Slowly the ivy on the stones 
 Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields 
 And men in waves become the sea.
It is the chord that flasifies. 
 The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick 
 Is a

weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive. 
 The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark 
 Of time, time grows upon the rock.
XII
Tom-tom, c'est moi. the blue guitar 
 And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men 
 High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said, 
 To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where 
 Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up 
 That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet 
 Must be. It could be nothing else.
XIII
The pale intrusions into blue 
 Are corrupting pallors...ay di mi,
Blue buds of pitchy blooms. Be content--
Expansions, diffusions--content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery, 
 The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame...
XIV
First one beam, then another, then 
 A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day 
 Is the riches of their atmosphere.
The sea appends its tattery hues. 
 The shores are banks of muffling mist.
One says a German chandelier-- 
 A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon 
 It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine, 
 The book and bread, things as they are,
In a chiaroscuro where 
 One sits and plays the blue guitar.
XV
Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard 
 Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,
Now, an image of our society? 
 Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold? 
 Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
XVI
The earth is not earth but a stone, 
 Not the mother that held men as they fell
But stone, but like a stone, no: not 
 The mother, but an oppressor, but like
An oppressor that grudges them their death,
As it grudges the living that they live.
To live in war, to live at war, 
 To chop the sullen psaltery,
To improve the sewers in Jerusalem, 
 To electrify the nimbuses--
Place honey on the altars and die, 
 You lovers that are bitter at heart.
XVII
The person has a mould. But not 
 Its animal.
The angelic ones
Speak of the soul, the mind. It is 
 An animal
The blue guitar--

On that its claws propound, its fangs
Articulate its desert days.
The blue guitar a mould? That shell? 
 Well, after all, the north wind blows
A horn, on which its victory 
 Is a worm composing on a straw.
XVIII
A dream (to call it a dream) in which 
 I can believe, in face of the object,
A dream no longer a dream, a thing, 
 Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch 
 The windgloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs, 
 Rising upward from a sea of ex.
XIX
That I may reduce the monster to 
 Myself, and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be 
 Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one, 
 And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all, 
 But of that as its intelligence,
Being the lion in the lute 
 Before the lion locked in stone.
XX
What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe? 
 Good air, my only friend, believe,
Believe would be a brother full 
 Of love, believe would be a friend
Friendlier than my only friend, 
 Good air.
Poor pale, poor pale guitar...
XXI
A substitute for all the gods: 
 This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified, 
 Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high, 
 The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft, 
 Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.
XXII
Poetry is the subject of the poem, 
 From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two, 
 Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality, 
 Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate? Is it 
 An absence for the poem, which acquires
Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?
From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, 
 In the universal intercourse.
XXIII
A few final solutions, like a duet 
 With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,
Another on earth, the one a voice 
 Of ether, the other smelling of drink.
The voice of ether prevailing, the swell 
 Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice 
 In the clouds serene and final, next
The grunted breath serene and final, 
 The imagined and the real, thought
And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain
One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.
XXIV
A poem like a missal found 
 In the mud, a missal for that young man,
That scholar hungriest for that book, 
 The very book, or, less, a page
Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase, 
 A hawk of life, that latined phrase:
To know; a missal for brooding-sight. 
 To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch
Not a the eye but at the joy of it. 
 I play. But this is what I think.
XXV
He held the world upon his nose 
 And thisa-way he gave a fling.
His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi-- 
 And that-away he twirled the thing.
Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats 
 Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.
And the nose is eternal, that-a-way. 
 Things as they were, things as they are,
Things as they will be by and by... 
 A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.
XXVI
The world washed in his imagination, 
 The world was a shore, whether sound or form
Or light, the relic of farewells, 
 Rock, of valedictory echoings,
To which his imagination returned, 
 From which it sped, a bar in space,
Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought
Against the murderous alphabet:
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed 
 To be falling and to be passing away.
XXVII
It is the sea that whitens the roof. 
 The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes. 
 The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Geographers and philosophers,
Regard. But for that salty cup, 
 But for the icicles on the eaves--
The sea is a form of ridicule. 
 The iceberg settings satirize
The demon that cannot be himself, 
 That tours to shift the shifting scene.
XXVIII
I am a native in this world 
 And think in it as a native thinks,
Gesu, not native of a mind 
 Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world 
 And like a native think in it.
It could not be a mind, the wave 
 In which the watery grasses flow
And yet are fixed as a photograph, 
 The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength 
 And as I am, I speak and move

And things are as I think they are 
 And say they are on the blue guitar.
XXIX
In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,
Alone, a lean Review and said,
"These degustations in the vaults 
 Oppose the past and the festival.
What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things 
 To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like, 
 To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like."
The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false. 
 The bells are the bellowing of bulls.
Yet Franciscan don was never more 
 Himself than in this fertile glass.
XXX
From this I shall evolve a man. 
 This is his essence: the old fantoche
Hanging his shawl upon the wind, 
 Like something on the stage, puffed out,
His strutting studied through centuries. 
 At last, in spite of his manner, his eye
A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung
Through Oxidia, banal suburb, 
 One-half of all its installments paid.
Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing 
 From crusty stacks above machines.
Ecce, Oxidia is the seed 
 Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,
Oxidia is the soot of fire, 
 Oxidia is Olympia.
XXXI
How long and late the pheasant sleeps...
The employer and employee contend,
Combat, compose their droll affair. 
 The bubbling sun will bubble up,
Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek. 
 The employer and employee will hear
And continue their affair. The shriek 
 Will rack the thickets. There is no place,
Here, for the lark fixed in the mind, 
 In the museum of the sky. The cock
Will claw sleep. Mourning is not sun, 
 It is this posture of the nerves,
As if a blunted player clutched 
 The nuances of the blue guitar.
It must be this rhapsody or none, 
 The rhapsody of things as they are.
XXXII
Throw away the lights, the definitions, 
 And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that, 
 But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations? 
 Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take 
 When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself. 
 The blue guitar surprises you.
XXXIII
That generation's dream, aviled 
 In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,
That's it, the only dream they knew, 
 Time in its final block, not time
To come, a wrangling of two dreams. 
 Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread 
 Will be

our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night. 
 We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play 
 The imagined pine, the imagined jay.