Rainer Maria Rilke: "A Walk"

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on,

answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

"A Walk" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly. © Harper Perennial, 1981.

Photography credit: "Hilly Road," by Joseph Austin (originally color).


 

May Sarton: "Now Voyager"

Now voyager, lay here your dazzled head.
Come back to earth from air, be nourished,
Not with that light on light, but with this bread.

Here close to earth be cherished, mortal heart,
Hold your way deep as roots push rocks apart
To bring the spurt of green up from the dark.

Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

Here close to earth the deeper pulse is stirred,
Here where no wings rush and no sudden bird,
But only heart-beat upon beat is heard.

Here let the fiery burden be all spilled,
The passionate voice at last be calmed and stilled
And the long yearning of the blood fulfilled.

Now voyager, come home, come home to rest,
Here on the long-lost country of earth’s breast
Lay down the fiery vision, and be blest, be blest.

"Now Voyager" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems, 1930-1993. © W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Photography credit: "Rock Splitting Tree," by Phil Taylor, the Faffer (originally color).


 

Todd Davis: "The Sound of Sunlight"

On the far side
of the canyon
light
is burning
through two
draws
like water
rushing
into an empty
riverbed.

A canyon wren
opens
her mouth
and a coyote
stops
midtrail
before vanishing
among juniper.

As we descend
the eastern wall
we look
down
onto
ponderosa
pine
and witness
the shadow
of a merlin
chase
the merlin
itself.

Behind us
in the meadow
where we lay
last night
the squall
of an elk
picks up
the sound
of sunlight
and joins it
in a flood
of bugling.

"The Sound of Sunlight" by Todd Davis, from In the Kingdom of the Ditch. © Michigan State University Press, 2013.  

Photography credit: "Light and shadow play with each other across the cliffs of the Grand Canyon," by Bhaskar Krishnamurthy (originally color).

Larry Schug: "A Lesson in Mindfulness"

A Buddhist monk

is trying to teach me

mindfulness

from a book

but my stomach

is too full of ice cream

for me to breathe properly.

Outside my window,

a hungry green heron,

perched perfectly still,

fully in his moment,

surveys the pond

for frogs and fish.

The teacher

has grown green wings,

the book having folded up

its feathers for the night.

"A Lesson in Mindfulness" by Larry Schug. © Larry Schug.

Photography credit: "Green Heron," by unknown photographer (originally color).



 

Changming Yuan: "Bird vs. Sea"

As if straight from heaven
A young snowy seagull charges down
Like a lightning strike
Trying to pick up the entire ocean
With its bold beak
As the tide raises
All its fierce fists
To protect against earth’s agitation
In foamy darkness

Far away, no one seems to stand
On the beach, watching

"Bird vs. Sea" by Changming Yuan. © Changming Yuan.

Photography credit: Detail from "Seagull Taking the Plunge," by AlbOst (originally color).



 

Mary Oliver: "Praying"

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

"Praying" by Mary Oliver, from Thirst: Poems. © Beacon Press, 2007.

Photography credit: Times-Picayune archive (originally color).



 

James Broughton: "Here's to It"

(A Metaphysical Drinking Song)

Here’s to that thing

we won’t admit! 

Here’s to the omnipresent

It!

Here’s to the IT

in which we sit

and stand and walk

and laugh and spit.

It’s in every act

that we commit. 

It’s our inescapable

requisite.

Here’s to the It,

our benefit

that makes the world

immediate. 

It is the cloth

most finely knit.

It’s all of a piece

but composite. 

It is the suit

with the perfect fit.

It always includes

its opposite.

It’s not the device

of a Jesuit.

It’s much older than

Holy Writ.

It’s not a mechanical

counterfeit.

It’s a metaphysical

hunting kit. 

It’s infinitely definite

and definitely infinite.

And It’s always here

so Here’s to It!

And all It says is

Submit

   to it!

                          

 

"Here's to It" by James Broughton, from Packing Up for Paradise: Selected Poems 1946-1996. © Black Sparrow Press, 1997.

Image credit: "Teenagers Contemplating Sunset," painting produced by computer software, by G.D. Zulch (originally color).


 

Alice Walker: "While Love Is Unfashionable"

for Mel

While love is unfashionable
let us live
unfashionably.
Seeing the world
a complex ball
in small hands;
love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
in all but truth, and courage
handed down
by the old spirits.
Let us be intimate with
ancestral ghosts
and music
of the undead.

While love is dangerous
let us walk bareheaded
beside the great River.
Let us gather blossoms under fire.



"While Love Is Unfashionable" by Alice Walker, from Revolutionary Petunias. © Mariner Books, 1973.

Image credit: "Working Together on Planet Earth," by Alan Crosthwaite (originally color).


 

Ellen Kort: "Walking on Water"

You know how it is sometimes
when you look out on water
smooth as a mirror I've always
wanted to try it so I simply
stepped off the dock when
everything was clear and still
It wasn't like flying or
sleep-walking But the surface wasn't hard as glass either
and it wasn't like parting
the Red Sea or anything I think
it was just a matter of wanting
to do it putting one foot
in front of the other and going

I went all the way around
the island and when I got back
this friend of mine asked me
where I was and I said "Out walking"
Now that I know that I can do it
I can hardly wait until tonight
When the moon comes up
and makes a path on the water
I know exactly where I'm going

"Walking on Water" by Ellen Kort. © Ellen Kort.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).




 

Charles Simic: "Miracle Glass Co."

Heavy mirror carried
Across the street,
I bow to you
And to everything that appears in you,
Momentarily
And never again the same way:

This street with its pink sky,
Row of gray tenements,
A lone dog,
Children on roller-skates,
Woman buying flowers,
Someone looking lost.

In you, mirror framed in gold
And carried across the street
By someone I can’t even see,
To whom, too, I bow.

"Miracle Glass Co." by Charles Simic, from A Wedding in Hell. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994.  

Photography credit: Detail from photo series entitled "Carrying a Mirror Thru La Candelaria," by Miguel (originally color).

Marge Piercy: "To Have Without Holding"

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

"To Have Without Holding" by Marge Piercy, from The Moon Is Always Female. © Knopf, 1980.

Image credit: "Arms Wide Open with Love," encaustic on board, by Ezshwan Winding (originally color).

Tess Gallagher: "The Hug"

A woman is reading a poem on the street
and another woman stops to listen. We stop too,
with our arms around each other. The poem
is being read and listened to out here
in the open. Behind us
no-one is entering or leaving the houses.

Suddenly, a hug comes over me and I'm
giving it to you, like a variable star shooting light
off to make itself comfortable, then
subsiding. I finish but keep on holding
you. A man walks up to us and we know he hasn't
come out of nowhere, but if he could, he
would have. He looks homeless because of how
he needs. "Can I have one of those?" he asks you,
and I feel you nod. I'm surprised,
surprised you don't tell him how
it is—that I'm yours, only
yours, exclusive as a nose to
its face. Love—that's what we're talking about, love
that nabs you with "for me
only" and holds on.

So I walk over to him and put my
arms around him and try to
hug him like I mean it. He's got an overcoat on
so thick I can't feel
him past it. I'm starting the hug
and thinking, "How big a hug is this supposed to be?
How long shall I hold this hug?" Already
we could be eternal, his arms falling over my
shoulders, my hands not
meeting behind his back, he is so big!

I put my head into his chest and snuggle
in. I lean into him. I lean my blood and my wishes
into him. He stands for it. This is his
and he's starting to give it back so well I know he's
getting it. This hug. So truly, so tenderly
we stop having arms and I don't know if
my lover has walked away or what, or
if the woman is still reading the poem, or the houses—
what about them?—the houses.

Clearly, a little permission is a dangerous thing.
But when you hug someone you want it
to be a masterpiece of connection, the way the button
on his coat will leave the imprint of
a planet on my cheek
when I walk away. When I try to find some place
to go back to.

"The Hug" by Tess Gallagher, from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems. © Graywolf Press, 2011.  

Image credit: "Give Me a Hug," oil on canvas, by Adeniyi Adeyi.

Carl Dennis: "Still Life"

Now's a good time, before the night comes on,
To praise the loyalty of the vase of flowers
Gracing the parlor table, and the bowl of oranges,
And the book with freckled pages resting on the tablecloth.
To remark how these items aren't conspiring
To pack their bags and move to a place
Where stillness appears to more advantage.
No plan for a heaven above, beyond, or within,
Whose ever-blooming bushes are rustling
In a sea breeze at this very moment.
These things are focusing all their attention
On holding fast as time washes around them.
The flowers in the vase won't come again.
The page of the book beside it, the edge turned down,
Will never be read again for the first time.
The light from the window's angled.
The sun's moving on. That's why the people
Who live in the house are missing.
They're all outside enjoying the light that's left them.
Lucky for them to find when they return
These silent things just as they were.
Night's coming on and they haven't been frightened off.
They haven't once dreamed of going anywhere.

"Still Life" by Carl Dennis, from Ranking the Wishes. © Penguin Poets, 1997.

Image credit: Untitled watercolor by unknown artist (originally color).


 

Octavio Paz: "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.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

"Between Going and Staying" by Octavio Paz, from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, translated by Eliot Weinberger. © New Directions Publishing, 1991.

Photography credit: "Shadows Low on the Office Wall," by Kevin J. Miyazaki (originally black and white).


 

Robert Bly: "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River"

I
I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.
The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.  
The soybeans are breathing on all sides.
Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats  
In the small towns. I am happy,
The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

    II
The small world of the car
Plunges through the deep fields of the night,  
On the road from Willmar to Milan.  
This solitude covered with iron
Moves through the fields of night
Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

       III
Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,
And water kneeling in the moonlight.
In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;  
The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass.
When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.  
A few people are talking, low, in a boat.



"Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River" by Robert Bly, from Silence in the Snowy Fields. © Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

Photography credit: "Headlights at Night," by unknown photographer (originally black and white).

Freya Manfred: "Green Pear Tree in September"

On a hill overlooking the Rock River
my father's pear tree shimmers,
in perfect peace,
covered with hundreds of ripe pears
with pert tops, plump bottoms,
and long curved leaves.
Until the green-haloed tree
rose up and sang hello,
I had forgotten...
He planted it twelve years ago,
when he was seventy-three,
so that in September
he could stroll down
with the sound of the crickets
rising and falling around him,
and stand, naked to the waist,
slightly bent, sucking juice
from a ripe pear.

"Green Pear Tree in September" by Freya Manfred, from My Only Home. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2003.

Image credit: "PearTree," ink on paper, by Amy Giacomelli (originally color).

Curator's Note: Sometimes Happy Mistakes Happen...

...and so it was last night, when I was preparing Galway Kinnell's "Prayer" for posting in early October. When I had it ready, I somehow managed to actually publish it instead of storing it in my queue of future posts.

My mistake went unnoticed until this morning, when I found in my inbox a reader's thoughtful note of thanks for Kinnell's poem.

My mistake. Your happy day. (Can one ever have too many mindfulness poems?)

Theodore Roethke: "The Waking"

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

"The Waking" by Theodore Roethke, from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. © Anchor, 1974.  

Photography credit: "Life Is," by unknown photographer (originally black and white).


 

Galway Kinnell: "Prayer"

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.


[Curator's note: Today, instead of a photograph, let's enjoy a video of the poet performing his poem, then offering a very brief comment. Though, on second thought, "performing" seems not the right word. "Praying," in his own way, perhaps? Or "delighting in his craft?" Watch Galway's face with care. All the way to the end.

If you can't see the embedded viewer below, click here to watch the clip, less than a minute long. Unfortunately the clip can't be embedded in this website to its full width, but Kinnell's presentation is still a treat.]

"Prayer" by Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poems, Edited by S. M. Intrator and M. Scribner. © HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.

Video credit: Poetry Matters Now.

Joseph Robert Mills: "Standing Before Shelves of Cookbooks and Trying to Decide What to Make for Dinner"

Most of these I’ve never used,
although each time I bought one
I was convinced that I would,
just as I thought I would read
the pile of parenting books
that now spills under the bed,
or the texts on physics,
stars, and string theory
stacked next to my desk.
I used to check out hundreds
of library books, hoping somewhere
in the pages would be the advice
I needed to make something
with the ingredients of my life,
yet each day ends up being
another hasty improvisation
with nothing measured cleanly
and no clear sequence to the steps.
Still, I continue to believe
in the idea of simple solutions,
ones as elegant as a wheel.
I remember how someone said
the best Italian dishes have no more
than four ingredients with the key
being freshness and quality,
how Archimedes claimed he could
move the world with a long enough lever
and a solid place to stand,
how the most powerful sentence
in the Bible is “Jesus wept.”
So later, after dinner, whatever it is,
I will navigate the dark bedrooms
of my children, threading past
piles of books, toys, and clothes,
until I stand before them,
the daughter and the son,
each asleep, wrapped in sheets
like loaves of fresh bread,
and I will murmur a kind of prayer:
May you recognize the wheel
of your days. May your faith
and friendships be flavored
with tears. May you find love
like a lever and a place to stand
together. May you have a life as
satisfying as a good Italian dish.

"Standing Before Shelves of Cookbooks and Trying to Decide What to Make for Dinner" by Joseph Robert Mills, from Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet. © Press 53, 2012.

Photography credit: Alexis Stewart (originally color).


 

Rabbit Ableegumooch: "The Poetry of Ordinary Time"

an interview with Marie Howe (a found poem)


I.
The parables and the stories—
all those great old stories—
so much mystery and complexity.
The story’s all there, but we know
that the story, the real story
is inarticulate.

The spaces in between.

You can hold what can’t be said.
The mystery of being alive;
a basket of words that feels inevitable.
A counter spell.

This is what we all need to walk around with.

Maybe the first poem
was a lullaby a woman sang to her child,
the incantatory everything is okay, everything is okay, everything is okay.
We prayed for rain, or we thanked the gods for the corn,
or we sang to the deer we were going to catch.
Its roots can never wholly be pulled out from
sacred ground.

Language is almost all we have left
of action in the modern world,
unless we’re in Syria or we’re in Iraq.
Action has become what we say.

In a big house different people experience different things.
Trauma shatters a unity. You are now in separate shards.
(As much as you want to be all in the same room,
trying to speak to another,
shard to shard.)

When I was a girl,
I would have to go to the backyard and
pick up
every cigarette butt.
I would think of Saint Teresa.
Just do every act as a prayer.
Then my father would come out and say,
You've missed this one, this one, and this one.
Everything in the world is trying to tell us this now,
even as we’re speeding up and speeding up,
and speeding up, and staring into our screens.
It hurts to be present.

Rinsing the glass
under the water.
Slow down enough to just
simply be there.
My daughter used to say to me,
Mom, slow down. If you slow down, you're going to get there faster.
Just watch. See that white car? Slow down.
Then we would get to the place and she’d say,
See, the white car is behind us.

When you’re very sad,
the only thing to do is to go learn something.

Write 10 observations of the actual world.
Just tell me what you saw this morning
in two lines.
I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth.
And the light came through it in three places.
No metaphor.
You have to actually endure the thing itself,
which hurts us for some reason.
It hurts us.

We want to say,
It was like this. It was like that.
We want to look away.
And then they say,
There's nothing important enough.
And then its whole thing
is that point.
No abstractions, no interpretations.

Then this amazing thing happens.
Clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff, and it thrilling.
The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the      trashcan closing, the maple tree, the blue jay.
it almost comes clanking into the room.


II.
Last spring,
somebody was drawing on the sidewalk in blue chalk.
All it said was HAPPINESS,
with a big blue arrow, THIS WAY.
One day,
I was waiting for my daughter and her friends to
get off one bus to get on another.
There
was the big blue chalk HAPPINESS,
and a big circle drawn on the sidewalk said HERE.
And everybody who walked by stood in the circle. We did too.
It’s the
this.
This is the whole
thing.
Why would I compare that to anything
when it’s
itself?


III.
There’s a silence
in the center of everything.
Maybe that’s the thing
we are afraid of.
Silence is the heart.
It has everything in it:
our death;
our life—the universes beyond
this universe, the galaxies.
The cricket, the snow.
Such a relief;
you can rest in
it.

The robots were going to take over
and the machines were going to take over.
Just last week it occurred to me: They have.
It's just different from what we expected.
You think evil is going to come into your houses
wearing big black boots.
It doesn’t come like that.
It begins in the language.

What face do you look into more
than any other face in your life?
I gaze into that face.
I do what it tells me to do.
It’s different from what we expected.
It’s like sugar.

There’s this new firmament,
and there's no one in charge.
I don’t even know what I mean by soul.
I don't know anymore.

Real time is true;
redundancy that’s happening now.
Remember those swaths of time between high holy seasons:
Ordinary time.
Nothing dramatic is happening;
this is where we’re living.

Finally we’re stopped long enough
to feel ourselves alive.

To move through the world transparently—
that would be a relief.
All I know is that
things have happened that I don't understand
that feel like the most important things
that have ever happened to me.

The unendurable happens.
People we love die;
we’re going to die—
one day we are going to have to leave our children,
leave the plants, the sunlight,
the rain and all that.
It's unendurable.

Art knows that
we’re both living and dying
at the same time.
It can hold it.

I thought, I can either let this crack my heart
open or closed.
I turned around and the
billion other people on this earth who’ve
lost a person they love—there they all were.
I turned around: I just joined you.

Welcome. There were millions of people;
I was glad to be with them.
We join each other;
We’re not alone.

Holding human stories up:
it’s so miraculous.

Everything is shared.


[Curator's note: This found poem, formed in the spirit of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, deserves comment. Its maker, who publishes a blog under the name Rabbit Ableegumooch, offers us this background: "One night when I couldn't sleep, I decided to listen to the latest On Being podcast, which was a really arresting conversation between Krista Tippett and a poet I'd never heard of, Marie Howe. There were so many words, lines, thoughts that stood out to me as I listened, and I kept thinking, I should write these down. But then they were more than just thoughts; it all sounded like a poem to me." Read more about the invention of this mindfulness poem on the Rabbit's Gone Missing blog.]

"The Poetry of Ordinary Time" by the blogger Rabbit Ableegumooch. Published on Rabbit's Gone Missing on May 28, 2013.

Image credit: Unknown.

Jane Miller: "Ecstasy"

As the ancients detail it

ecstasy passes over us

in a mist of particles

it lives bare

dies unburied

I finally understand it is raining

it is beautiful

a couple of hawks in a tree

and not the tree entire

"Ecstasy" by Jane Miller. Published in Boston Review, May/June 2013.  

Photography credit: detail of an image by Eric Christian, 2003 (originally color).


 

David Budbill: "Sometimes"

Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,

warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when

it seems like all this will go on forever,

when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day,

then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun,

and in the evening one night make pickled beets

and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney,

and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor

and make grape jam,

when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves,

through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,

when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear

or somehow be taken away from all this,

at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love

with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly

I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony

and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now,

in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with

the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be

taken from me, and therefore I've got to say, right now,

what I feel and know and see, I've got to say, right now,

how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

"Sometimes" by David Budbill. © David Budbill.

Image credit: "Couple Walking in Woods," oil on board, by James R. Smith.

Louise Glück: "Twilight"

All day he works at his cousin’s mill,
so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window,
sees one time of day, twilight.
There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.
It’s as his cousin says:
Living—living takes you away from sitting.

In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape
representing the world. The seasons change,
each visible only a few hours a day.
Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness—
abstractions from which come intense pleasures,
like the figs on the table.

At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.
It goes down late in summer—sometimes it’s hard to stay awake.

Then everything falls away.
The world for a little longer
is something to see, then only something to hear,
crickets, cicadas.
Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.
Then sleep takes this away also.

But it’s easy to give things up like this, experimentally,
for a matter of hours.

I open my fingers—
I let everything go.

Visual world, language,
rustling of leaves in the night,
smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.

I let it go, then I light the candle.

"Twilight" by Louise Glück, from A Village Life. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.  

Image credit: "Night Window," digital art by Alan Klepacz (originally color).

Rafael Jesús González: "Grace"

Thanks & blessings be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
     this fruit, this meat, this salt,
          this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessings to them
who share it
     (& also the absent & the dead).
Thanks & blessing to them who bring it
     (may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
     (may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
     & blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want—for their hunger
     sours the wine & robs
          the taste from the salt.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & work of justice, of peace.

"Grace" by Rafael Jesús González, from In Praise of Fertile Land: An Anthology of Poetry, Parable and Story, edited by Claudia Mauro. © Whit Press, 2006.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).


 

Philip Levine: "What Work Is"

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.



"What Work Is" by Philip Levine, from What Work Is. © Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.  

Photography credit: "Workers outside the CMI factory in Campbellfield this morning," by Penny Stephens, April 16, 2012.