Hafiz: "Today"

I

Do not

Want to step so quickly

Over a beautiful line on God's palm

As I move through the earth's

Marketplace

Today.

I do not want to touch any object in this world

Without my eyes testifying to the truth

That everything is

My Beloved.

Something has happened

To my understanding of existence

That now makes my heart always full of wonder

And kindness.

I do not

Want to step so quickly

Over this sacred place on God's body

That is right beneath your

Own foot

As I

Dance with

Precious life

Today.

"Today" by Hafiz, from The Gift: Poems of Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master. Purported to be translated from the original Persian (Farsi) by Daniel Ladinsky. © Penguin Compass, 1999.

Please note that Ladinsky's "translations" are controversial, considered by many to be less Hafiz than Ladinsky himself. 

Art credit: "One Step Closer," photograph taken in 2006 in Washington Square, San Francisco, by Victor Zhang (originally black and white).

Ralph Murre: "The Light This Day"

                                                  

                                                The light this day
                                                has every leaf of the forest
                                                   crying for its beauty
                                                   every ripple on this lake
                                                   outshining the next
                                                   a far crow
                                                   fearing
                                                   the loss of his darkness



"The Light This Day" by Ralph Murre, from The Price of Gravity. © Auk Ward Editions, 2010.

Art credit: "Crows—Towards the sun I fly, not as Icarus," photograph by Hash Milhan (originally color, digitally manipulated by curator).

 

Jason Shinder: "Coda"

And now I know what most deeply connects us

after that summer so many years ago,
and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry,

and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common,

and it isn’t gratitude for every moment,
even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain,

though we are halfway through
it, or even the way you describe the magnificence

of being alive, catching a glimpse,

in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips,
though it is beautiful, it is; but it is

that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches

of what humans can find out about each other.


 
"Coda" by Jason Shinder. Published in American Poetry Review (November/December, 2008). © Jason Shinder.

This poem was written during the illness that claimed the poet's life in April 2008.

Art credit: "Wind," photograph by AislingImages (originally black and white).

Mark Jarman: "After Disappointment"

To lie in your child’s bed when she is gone

Is calming as anything I know. To fall

Asleep, her books arranged above your head,

Is to admit that you have never been

So tired, so enchanted by the spell

Of your grown body. To feel small instead

Of blocking out the light, to feel alone,

Not knowing what you should or shouldn’t feel,

Is to find out, no matter what you’ve said

About the cramped escapes and obstacles

You plan and face and have to call the world,

That there remain these places, occupied

By children, yours if lucky, like the girl

Who finds you here and lies down by your side.

"After Disappointment" by Mark Jarman, from Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. © Sarabande Books, 2011.

Art credit: "Waldorf/Steiner dolls on my daughter's bed," photograph by Jacinta Gleeson Munn (originally color).

Julia Fehrenbacher: "Hold Out Your Hand"

Let's forget the world for a while
fall back and back
into the hush and holy
of now

are you listening? This breath
invites you
to write the first word
of your new story

your new story begins with this:
You matter

you are needed—empty
and naked
willing to say yes
and yes and yes

Do you see
the sun shines, day after day
whether you have faith
or not
the sparrows continue
to sing their song
even when you forget to sing
yours

stop asking: Am I good enough?
Ask only
Am I showing up
with love?

Life is not a straight line
it's a downpour of gifts, please—
hold out your hand

"Hold Out Your Hand" by Julia Fehrenbacher. Presented here by poet submission. © Julia Fehrenbacher.

Art credit: "Woman Holding Hands Out with Palms Facing Up," photograph by Alain Couillaud (originally sepia).

Mary Oliver: "Mysteries, Yes"

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
    to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
    mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
    in allegiance with gravity
        while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
    never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
    scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
    who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
    "Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
 and bow their heads.



"Mysteries, Yes" by Mary Oliver, from Evidence: Poems. © Beacon Press, 2010.

Art credit: "Waterfall on the Trail of the Cedars in Glacier National Park, Montana," photograph taken in July, 2014, by curator Phyllis Cole-Dai.

John Glenday: "Concerning the Atoms of the Soul"

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the centre

of whatever everything is. And we don’t see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That’s what weight is, that communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that’s what keeps us from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on another’s heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light
at the centre of whatever the suspected
centre is, or might have been.

"Concerning the Atoms of the Soul" by John Glenday, from Undark. © Peterloo Poets, 1995.

Art credit: "Quantum Gravity," photograph by unknown photographer (originally color).

 

Ted Kooser: "Porch Swing in September"

The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it's time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.



"Porch Swing in September" by Ted Kooser, from Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

Art credit: "Painting No. 36: Porch Swing," oil on gessoboard, by Jessica Green (originally color).

Wendell Berry: "Enriching the Earth"

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.



"Enriching the Earth" by Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems, 1957-1982. © North Point Press, 1985.

Art credit: "The Sower," pastel and crayon or pastel on cream buff paper, by Jean-François Millet (originally color).

Lynn Ungar: "Camas Lilies"

Consider the lilies of the field,

the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

 
"Camas Lilies" by Lynn Ungar, from Blessing the Bread: Meditations. © Skinner House, 1995. Presented here as posted on the poet's website.

Art credit: "A red winged blackbird among spring camas blooms," photograph by Greg Stahl.

W. S. Merwin: "By the Front Door"

                                       Rain through the morning
                                       and in the long pool a toad singing
                                       happiness old as water



"By the Front Door" by W. S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014.

Art credit: Detail from "Common Frog Croaking," photograph by © Chris Grady (originally color).

 

David Barber: "Corn Maze"

Here is where
You can get nowhere
Faster than ever
As you go under
Deeper and deeper

In the fertile smother
Of another acre
Like any other
You can’t peer over
And then another

And everywhere
You veer or hare
There you are
Farther and farther
Afield than before

But on you blunder
In the verdant meander
As if   the answer
To looking for cover
Were to bewilder

Your inner minotaur
And near and far were
Neither here nor there
And where you are
Is where you were



"Corn Maze" by David Barber. Published in Poetry (March 2013). © David Barber.  

Art credit: "Get Lost in the Maize!", photograph by unknown photographer (originally color).

 

Mary Chivers: "Late August"

It's as if we're always preparing
for something, the endless  roll of the earth
ripening us.
Even on the most tranquil
late August afternoon when heavy heads
of phlox bow in the garden
and the hummingbird sits still for a moment
on a branch of an apple tree—
even on such a day,
evening approaches sooner
than yesterday, and we cannot help
noticing whole families of birds
arrive together in the enclosure,
young blue birds molted a misty grey,
colored through no will of their own
for a journey.
On such an evening
I ache for what I cannot keep—the birds,
the phlox, the late-flying bees—
though I would not forbid the frost,
even if I could. There will be more to love
and lose in what's to come and this too: desire
to see it clear before it's gone.

"Late August" by Mary Chivers, from Lasting Words: A Guide to Finding Meaning Toward the Close of Life, by Claire B. Willis. © Green Writers Press, 2014.

Thanks to subscriber Claire Willis for suggesting this poem. 

Art credit: "Western Bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) Flock at the Water Tanks," photograph by Arlene Ripley © 2010 (originally color).

Denise Levertov: "The Breathing"

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
          White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.



"The Breathing" by Denise Levertov, from Poems: 1960-1967. © New Directions Publishing, 1983.

Art credit: Image 13 of 15 by Stephen Matera (originally black and white). Caption: "Fog rolls through old growth forest in summer, Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River Valley, Central Cascades."
 
 

Marge Piercy: "The Art of Blessing the Day"

[Curator's note: If you can't see the viewer above, watch the video here.]


This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your splashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

"The Art of Blessing the Day" by Marge Piercy, from The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. © Knopf, 1999.

Video credit: "Ode to Joy" flash mob in Sabadell, Spain, posted to YouTube by Be Inzpired! on April 2, 2013. Featuring Ludwig Van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and "Ode to Joy."

Bronislaw Maj: "An August Afternoon"

An August afternoon. Even here is heard
the rush of the glittering Raba.
We look at the mountains,
my mother and I. How clear the air is:
every dark spruce on Mount Lubon
is seen distinctly as if it grew in our garden.
An astonishing phenomenon—it astonishes my mother
and me. I am four and do not know
what it means to be four  I am
happy: I do not know what to be means
or happiness  I know my mother
sees and feels what I do. And I know
that as always in the evening
we will take a walk
far, up to the woods, already before
long.

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

Art credit: "Night on Mt. Lubon," photograph by Tlapp, taken on 2009/10/08 in Luboń Wielki, Szlak pieszy żółty, Poland (originally color).

 

Linda Pastan: "Things I Didn't Know I Loved: After Nazim Hikmet"

I always knew I loved the sky,
the way it seems solid and insubstantial at the same time;
the way it disappears above us
even as we pursue it in a climbing plane,
like wishes or answers to certain questions—always out of reach;
the way it embodies blue,
even when it is gray.

But I didn't know I loved the clouds,
those shaggy eyebrows glowering
over the face of the sun.
Perhaps I only love the strange shapes clouds can take,
as if they are sketches by an artist
who keeps changing her mind.
Perhaps I love their deceptive softness,
like a bosom I'd like to rest my head against
but never can.

And I know I love the grass, even as I am cutting it as short
as the hair on my grandson's newly barbered head.
I love the way the smell of grass can fill my nostrils
with intimations of youth and lust;
the way it stains my handkerchief with meanings
that never wash out.

Sometimes I love the rain, staccato on the roof,
and always the snow when I am inside looking out
at the blurring around the edges of parked cars
and trees. And I love trees,
in winter when their austere shapes
are like the cutout silhouettes artists sell at fairs
and in May when their branches
are fuzzy with growth, the leaves poking out
like new green horns on a young deer.

But how about the sound of trains,
those drawn-out whistles of longing in the night,
like coyotes made of steam and steel, no color at all,
reminding me of prisoners on chain gangs I've only seen
in movies, defeated men hammering spikes into rails,
the burly guards watching over them?

Those whistles give loneliness and departure a voice.
It is the kind of loneliness I can take in my arms, tasting
of tears that comfort even as they burn, dampening the pillows
and all the feathers of all the geese who were plucked to fill
them.

Perhaps I embrace the music of departure—song without lyrics,
so I can learn to love it, though I don't love it now.
For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,
and even you my love of so many years,
have almost disappeared,
it will be all there is left to love.



"Things I Didn't Know I Loved: After Nazim Hikmet" by Linda Pastan, from Queen of a Rainy Country: Poems. © W. W. Norton, 2006.

Read Nazim Hikmet's "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" here.

Art credit: "LMS The Flying Scotsman, Night Train to Scotland," giclée print by Norman Wilkinson (originally color; found under various titles online).

Muriel Rukeyser: "Islands"

                                          O for God’s sake
                                          they are connected
                                          underneath

                                          They look at each other
                                          across the glittering sea
                                          some keep a low profile

                                          Some are cliffs
                                          The Bathers think
                                          islands are separate like them



"Islands" by Muriel Rukeyser, from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.  

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer (originally color). Presented with this quote from William James: "We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep."

Joyce Sutphen: "The Book of Hours"

There was that one hour sometime

in the middle of the last century.

It was autumn, and I was in my father's

woods building a house out of branches

and the leaves that were falling like

thousands of letters from the sky.

And there was that hour in Central Park

in the middle of the seventies.

We were sitting on a blanket, listening

to Pete Seeger singing "This land is

your land, this land is my land," and

the Vietnam War was finally over.

I would definitely include an hour

spent in one of the galleries of the

Tate Britain, looking up at the

painting of King Cophetua and

the Beggar Maid, and, afterwards

the walk along the Thames, and

I would also include one of those

hours when I woke in the night and

couldn't get back to sleep thinking

about how nothing I thought was going

to happen happened the way I expected,

and things I never expected to happen did—

just like that hour today, when we saw

the dog running along the busy road,

and we stopped and held on to her

until her owner came along and brought

her home—that was an hour well

spent. Yes, that was a keeper.



"The Book of Hours" by Joyce Sutphen. Published online by The Writer's Almanac, September 9, 2007. © Joyce Sutphen. 

Art credit: "Greg Cook and Coco," photograph taken March 2, 2012, by Gary Cosby Jr./AP Photo/The Decatur Daily (originally color).

David Watts: "Fragment at the Beginning of Something..."

My son brings me a stone and asks
which star it fell from. He is serious
and so I must be careful,
even though I know he will place it
among those things
that will leave him someday
and he will go on, gathering.
For this is one of those moments
that turns suddenly
toward you, opening as it turns,
as if for an instant we paused
on the edge of a heartbeat
and then pressed forward, conscious
of the fear that runs beside us
and how lovely it is to be with each other
in the long, resilient mornings.


 

"Fragment at the Beginning of Something..." by David Watts, from Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer. © Random House/Harmony Books, 2005. Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: "Cloudy stone, rounded by the sea, on a palm of a child," photograph uploaded by Profe (originally color).