[Sven2]

Study Of Loneliness

A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?
A one-man crew of a fortress in the sand?
Whoever he was. At dawn he saw furrowed mountains
The color of ashes, above the melting darkness,
Saturated with violet, breaking into fluid rouge,
Till they stood, immense, in the orange light.
Day after day. And, before he noticed, year after year.
For whom, he thought, that splendor? For me alone?
Yet it will be here long after I perish.
What is it in the eye of a lizard? Or when seen by a migrant bird?
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
And he knew there was no use crying out, for none of them would save him.

Czeslaw Milosz

[Sven2]

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Mark Strand

[Sven2]

from The Dreams of Chang

"For, were all these Buddhas of yours more foolish than
you and I? And yet, just you listen to what they say
about this love of the universe and all things corporeal,
beginning with sunlight, with a wave, with the air, and
winding up with woman, with an infant, with the scent
of white acacia! Or else, -- do you know what sort of a
thing this Tao is, that has been thought up by nobody
else but you Chinamen? I know it but poorly myself,
brother, but then, everybody knows it poorly; but, as
far as it is possible to understand it, just what is it, after
all? The Abyss, our First Mother; She gives birth to all
things that exist in this universe, and She devours them
as well, and, devouring them, gives birth to them anew;
or, to put it in other words, It is the Path of all that ex-
ists, which nothing that exists may resist. But we resist
It every minute; every minute we want to turn to our
desire not only the soul of a beloved woman, let us say,
but even the entire universe as well! It is an eerie thing
to be living in this world, Chang," said the captain; "it's
a most pleasant thing, but still an eerie one, and espe-
cially for such as I! For I am too avid of happiness, and
all too often do I lose the way: dark and evil is this
Path, -- or is it entirely, entirely otherwise?"
And, after a silence, he added further:
"For after all, what is the main thing? When you
love somebody, there is no power on earth that can make
you believe that the one you love can possibly not love
you. And that is just where the devil comes in, Chang.
But how magnificent life is; my God, how magnificent!"

--Ivan Bunin
translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney

[Sven2]

"When the world is burning, I seize up and go inward. I don't speak soon. I get quiet. I watch. I read the words of outrage and heart break and confusion and reflex. I wonder why assault rifles are a thing. I think of the gay clubs I've danced in, laughing in the safety of music and friends. I think of how safe I always feel. How easy it is to die. How easy it is to kill. I am not a protestor, a shouter. I am not a fighter. I would die quickly in a war. I would watch my killer with a steady gaze and ask him why. He wouldn't answer me.
   
    I am glad the white-blood cells of humanity spring forth like grass after the first rain. The way human beings support each other after tragedy is a reminder of how dominant goodness is. How unusual cruelty. I've been in the mountains. I've watched the river. It's high right now and has knocked down trees. Those trees are dead. Why? Because of a million tiny drops of rain that never knew the tree added up and tore down the bank. The dreams of the tree are gone. The unthinking water is rushing. The world is too big for me. The hurt of some people, the things that happen to hurt people's minds that turn them cold and deadly. The accruing of darkness. The kindness we could've shown, earlier. The world is too big for me".

glassofwhiskey - @jedidiahjenkins
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[Sven2]

Come Back to Tell Us

Dusk in August—
which means nearly
nine o'clock here, deep
in the heart of central
Jersey—and the deer
step out to graze
the backyards. They tear
each yellowy red
tulip cup, munch up
rhododendrons
and azaleas. Fifty
years of new houses
have eaten into
their woodland, leaving
only this narrow strip
of trees along the trickly
stream that zigzags
between Route 9
and Lily's mom's
backyard. The deer rise
from the mist, hooves
clicking on asphalt, a doe
and a buck, his antlers
like a chandelier.
Sometimes a doe and two
fawns. Or else we see
just the white flags
of their tails bobbing away
into the dark. In theory
the DNR should come
catch them, let them go
where it's still
forest, still possible to live
as they were meant to.
But these days
there's no money
for that. And people keep
leaving out old bread,
rice, stale cookies, or else
plant more delicious flowers.
"Mei banfa,"
my mother-in-law says:
Nothing can be done.
Seeing them in
the distance—that distance
we can't close
without them shying
and turning and skittering
down Dickinson Lane
or bounding
over a backyard fence—
I try to imagine
they're messengers
come back to tell us
their stories, any news
of the lost or what
comes next, though
if they could say
anything, they would
probably say, Go away.

--Matthew Thorburn

[Sven2]

Meanwhile

It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees
along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.
In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.
Now it waits in New England while I say grace over
almost everything: for a possum dead on someone's lawn,
the single light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,
and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets
are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side
with barley. Loneliness is the mother's milk of America.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none
of us is good at.Winter lingers on in the woods,
but already it looks discarded as the birds return
and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power
or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.
My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing
and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.


--Jack Gilbert

[Lily B]

Spiritual Guides

© Terrie Brushette

Published on January 2008

Who are they, what do they do?
Where do they come from, are they for me and you?
What do they look like, how do they sound?
Where do you keep them, where are they found?

Can you hear them, see them, touch them
How long do they stay?
Maybe a year, a week or just even a day

Questions you ask of them you see
They are here to help us you and me
To guide and love us through all our years
Keeping away darkness and negative fears

But to find one yourself there's little to do
Just relax and listen to the true you
The little word or thought in your head
Is it a guide or something you read

My guess is with little effort and care
Your going on a journey so be prepared
To a wonderful place that's hard to have foreseen
Where your guides are and have always been

Talk to them and listen with ease
To what they say you will be pleased
So now you know your questions fulfilled
Because you took the time your mind you stilled

It doesn't take much, just a few minutes a day
To meet your guides who have something to say
Words of great wisdom given with love
To spread round the world from up above

[Sven2]

May

                      Let me look at those eyes.
                      I want to know how you are.
                         —Rainer W. Fassbinder


Look. May has come in.
It's strewn those blue eyes all over the harbor.
Come, I haven't had word of you in ages.
You're constantly terrified,
Like the kittens we drowned when we were little.
Come and we'll talk over all of the old same things,
The value of being pleasant,
The need to adjust to the doubts,
How to fill the holes we've got inside us.
Come, feel the morning reaching your face,
Whenever we're saddened everything looks dark,
When we're heartened, again, the world crumbles.
Every one of us keeps forever someone else's hidden side,
If it's a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture.
Come and we'll flay the winners,
Laughing at our self leapt off the bridgeway.
We'll watch the cranes at work in the port in silence,
The gift for being together in silence being
The principal proof of friendship.
Come with me, I want to change nations,
Change towns. Leave this body aside
And go into a shell with you,
With our smallness, like sea snails.
Come, I'm waiting for you,
We'll continue the story that ended a year ago,
As if inside the white birches next to the river
Not a single additional ring had grown.

--Kirmen Uribe
translated by Elizabeth Macklin

[Sven2]

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the

         wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the

         lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering

         the themes thou loves best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.


--Walt Whitman

[Lily B]

Once Upon a Summer's Eve

I had a dream one sultry summer's eve
A vision as the sun began to wane
An angel weeping made my soul to grieve
I clearly sensed his sadness and his pain

With teary eyes I asked him what was wrong
And was there anything that I could do
His words to me were spoken in a song
I came to understand his point of view

He told me he'd been watching from on high
So many people fighting down below
Why couldn't they make peace, he wondered why
If only they would try, true love would flow

I slept that night uneasy and in prayer
Will anyone who reads this even care

The Seeker


Yes I care! I to wish the family of man would play nice in God's garden. Keep the faith this world is a classroom in which we sometimes make mistakes. One day we all will get it right.
Imagine what that would look like.

Lily B

[Sven2]

The Season of Phantasmal Peace


Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
                                                     it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.


--Derek Walcott

[Sven2]

Peace, So That

every stinking son of a bitch
can come home
to his lawn mower and rice paddy,
every punished son of a bitch
can return to his father's bedside,
every child of every bastard
every child of a hero of peace
of war
can talk it over with the man he blames,
every woman, mother, wife, daughter
will rise in our arms like the tide,
every bomb be water,
every bullet be smashed into frying pans,
every knife sharpened again
to cut fruit in thin slices,
every word flung out like a bullet
in anger
come back to putrefy the tongue,
every man who has sat silent
beware of his silence,
every rising of the blood
make love to a woman, a man,
every killer have only mirrors
to shoot at,
every child a thumb to suck,
every house its chance
to sink to the earth's calling,
every dead shall have no good reasons.

And we be a long time at this.


--Greg Kuzma

[Sven2]

Horses

In truth I am puzzled most in life
by nine horses.

I've been watching them for eleven weeks
in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven
on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places
hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question
to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another
in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,
sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear
creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives
on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which
we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses
in their sweet-smelling silence.


--Jim Harrison

[Sven2]

Untitled [Into the land of youth]


Into the land of youth, westward, to the place of starting again, cities of gold, on the coast of promise--mysterious cure--a mirror's thrown down, and so without luck, without reflection we stop.

We have come to the beginning, the finish of the country, itinerary worn out, facing the surf--what sailors smell as land. We ask detailed questions. None of us can tell, so we tug on each other, "Come. Look."

In this lull, one at the tide line stoops to pick at foam and weeds; another builds a fire. The intended didn't arrive and there is no new plan. As the sun lowers, we face the mountains, consider what we have passed, and fall to dreaming, to scrounging.

--Killarney Clary

[Sven2]

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus (November 2, 1883)