let what you love be what you do

ye are many by Percy Shelley

2012-01-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'
Percy Shelley

The Mask of Anarchism

a moment of silence - Emmanuel Ortiz

2011-09-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

Before I start this poem,
I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam – a people, not a war – for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war … ssssshhhhhhh…

Say nothing
we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas

25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of Indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children

Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence,
Take it.

But take it all…
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

Emmanuel Ortiz is a third-generation Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American community organizer and spoken word poet residing in Minneapolis, MN. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Minnesota Spoken Word Association, and is the coordinator of Guerrilla Wordfare, a Twin Cities-based grassroots project bringing together artists of color to address socio-political issues and raise funds for progressive organizing in communities of color through art as a tool of social change.

2011-07-24T08:04:00.001-07:00

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
...I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds circled in flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Anonymous

the well of grief - david whyte

2011-07-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning downwards through its black waters
to a place we can not breathe...
They will not find the source from which we drink.
The secret water; clean and clear.
Nor will they find in its darkness, glimmering,
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Song of myself (extract) Walt Whitman (1855)

2011-05-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

I have heard what the talkers were talking,
The talk of the beginning
and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning
or the end.
There was never anymore beginning
than there are now,
Nor any more youth or age
than there is now,
And never be any more perfection
than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell
than there is now.
Clear and sweet is my soul,
And clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
I welcome every organ and attribute of me
Not an inch,
Not a particle of an inch is vile to me.
I am satisfied –
I see, I dance, I laugh, I sing!
I will go to the bank of the river in the woods
And become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it all to embrace me.
I am obsessed with the agony and ecstasy of this life!
It all amazes me!

The honeycomb - Pauline Stainer

2011-04-07T11:26:00.001-07:00

They had made love early in the high bed,
not knowing the honeycomb stretched
between lathe and plaster of the outer wall.

For a century
the bees had wintered there,
prisoning sugar in the virgin wax.

At times of transition,
spring and autumn,
their vibration swelled the room.

Laying his hand against the plaster
in the May sunrise,
he felt faint frequency of their arousal,

Nor winters later, burning the beeswax candle,
could he forget his tremulous first loving
into the humming dawn.

Pauline Stainer

DH Lawrence - the glass bottles of our ego

2011-03-23T01:43:00.000-07:00

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

Creation is praising her God

2011-02-20T15:42:00.001-08:00

Creation is praising her God

in the inner city.

Window boxes,

burst into life.

The city park opens its gates,

to welcome the day.

Secret roof gardens

give glory to the highest heavens.

Forgotten waste ground,

decked with willow herb,

makes space for the urban fox to hide,

for birds to sing and be heard.

In the cracks,

where pavement meets factory wall,

poppies spring up,

flashing red and orange.

People occupy borrowed ground,

with plants and shrubs,

with pathways and picnics,

till the council is ready to build.

Between the cars,

against the odds,

a butterfly weaves its unsteady dance

to the Risen One.

Creation is praising her God!

Join her now in celebrating

all that tend seeds of life

in unexpected places.

Brian Woodcock.

When death comes - Mary Oliver

2011-01-30T19:00:00.000-08:00

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

In Blackwater Woods - Mary Oliver

2010-12-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

"Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Kahlil Gibran - On Pleasure

2010-12-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

Pleasure is a freedom-song, But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit.
It is a depth calling unto a height, But it is not the deep nor the high. It is the caged taking wing,
But it is not space encompassed.
Ay, in very truth, pleasure is a freedomsong.
And I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing.

Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked.
I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek.
For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone;
Seven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.
Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure?

And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness.
But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement.
They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.
Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted.

And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember;
And in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it.
But even in their foregoing is their pleasure.
And thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands.
But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit?
Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars?
And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?
Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff?

Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.
Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?
Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.
And your body is the harp of your soul,
And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.

And now you ask in your heart, "How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?"
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.

People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.

A Rare Bee - Carol Ann Duffy,

2010-12-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

I heard tell of a tale of a rare bee,
kept in a hive in the soul of a wood
by a hermit – hairshirt, heart long hurt -
and that this bee made honey so pure,
when pressed to the pout of a poet
it made her profound, or if smeared
on the smile of a singer it sweetened his sound;
or when eased on the eyes of an artist,
Pablo Picasso lived and breathed;
so I saddled my steed.

No birds sang in the branches over my head,
though I saw the wreaths of empty nests
on the ground as I rode – girl, poet, knight -
darker into the trees where the white hart
was less than a ghost or a thought, was as light
as the written word; legend. But wasn’t going, gone,
I mused, from the land, or the sky, or the sea?
I dismounted my bony horse to walk;
out of the silence
I fancied I heard the bronze buzz of a bee.

So I came to kneel at the hermit’s hive -
a little church, a tiny mosque – in a mute glade
where the loner muttered and prayed, blind
as the sun, and saw with my open eyes
one bee dance alone on the air.
I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey,
bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.
It flew at my mouth and stung.
Then the terrible tune of the hermit’s grief.
Then a gesturing, dying bee
on the bier of a leaf.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

2010-12-03T07:31:00.001-08:00

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Read more: http://www.inspirational-poems.net/famous-nature-poems/130-stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening#ixzz173yNZ6Vu

I Heard a Bird Sing - by Oliver Herford

2010-12-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

I heard a bird sing
In the night of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.

"We are nearer to Spring

Than we were in September,"
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.

A Herbal by Seamus Heaney

2010-12-03T07:21:00.000-08:00

Everywhere plants

Flourish among graves

Sinking their roots

In all the dynasties

Of the dead

Was graveyard grass

In our place

Any different?

Different from ordinary

Field grass?

Remember how you wanted

The sound recordist

To make a loop,

Wildtrack of your feet

Through the wet

At the foot of a field?

Yet for all their lush

Compliant dialect

No way have plants here

Arrived at a settlement.

Not the mare's tail

Nor the broom or whins.

It must have to do

With the wind.

Not that grass itself

Ever rests in peace.

It too takes issue

Now sets its face

To the wind,

Now turns its back.

'See me?' it says,

'The wind

Has me well-rehearsed

In the ways of the world.

Unstable is good.

Permission granted!

Go then citizen

Of the wind.

Go with the flow.'

The bracken

Is less boastful.

It closes and curls back

On its secrets,

The best kept

Upon earth.

And to be fair,

There is sun as well.

Nowhere else
Is there sun like here,

Morning sunshine

All day long.

Which is why the plants,

Even the bracken,

Are sometimes tempted

Into trust.

On sunlit tarmac,

On memories of the hearse

At walking pace

Between overgrown verges,

The dead here are borne

Towards the future.

When the funeral bell tolls

The grass is all a-tremble.

But only then.

Not every time any old bell

Rings.

Broom

Is like the disregarded

And company for them,

Shows them

They have to keep going,

That the whole thing’s worth

The effort.

And sometimes

Like those same characters

When the weather’s very good

Broom sings.

Never, in later days,

Would fruit

So taste of earth.

There was slate

In the blackberries,

A slatey sap.

Run your hand into

The ditchback growth

And you’d grope roots,

Thick and thin.

But roots of what?

Once, one that we saw

Gave itself away,

The tail of a rat

We killed.

We had enemies,

Though why we never knew.

Among them,

Nettles,

Malignant things, letting on

To be asleep.

Enemies –

Part of a world

Nobody seemed able to explain

But that had to be

Put up with.

There would always be dock leaves

To cure the vicious stings.

There were leaves on the trees

And growth on the headrigs

You could confess

Everything to.

Even your fears

Of the night,

Of people

Even.

What was better then

Than to crush a leaf or a herb

Between your palms,

Then wave is slowly, soothingly

Past your mouth and nose

And breathe?

If you know a bit

About the universe

It’s because you’ve taken it in

Like that,

Looked as hard as you look

Into yourself,

Into the rat hole,

Through the vetch and dock

That mantled it.

Because you’ve laid your cheek

Against the rush clump

And known soft stone to break

On the quarry floor.

Between heather and marigold,

Between spaghnum and buttercup

Between dandelion and broom,

Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,

As between clear blue and cloud,

Between haystack and sunset sky,

Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence, I was there.

Me in place and the place in me.

Where can it be found again,

An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases,

Where all is woven into

And of itself, like a nest

Of crosshatched grass blades?

quote

2010-11-08T07:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was clever.
That is why I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise.
That is why I am changing myself.
Sri Chinmoy

Sleeping in the forest - Mary Oliver

2010-10-25T06:32:00.001-07:00

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

The Journey - Mary Oliver

2010-10-25T06:31:00.001-07:00

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

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.

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

2010-06-28T16:09:00.001-07:00

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in 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 with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

2010-03-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Thank you to Fr Peter for reminding me

Excerpts from Common Sense

2010-03-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

We have been born
into a moment
of unprecedented danger and opportunity.

Our failure to act
is itself a choice.

There is nowhere to hide
from this awareness.

It is time.

Our purpose here
is to build a bridge.

The purpose of the bridge
is to span the distance
between our present situation
and our vision of a better world.

The beauty of a bridge is that,
once it is in place,
anyone can walk on it.

A few people can build a bridge
that can be walked on by many.

Virgil's Bees by Carol Ann Duffy

2010-03-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze,
each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

There was a child went forth - Walk Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900

2010-02-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him; 10
Winter-grain sprouts, and those of the light-yellow corn, and the esculent roots of the garden,
And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms, and the fruit afterward, and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road;
And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had lately risen,
And the school-mistress that pass’d on her way to the school,
And the friendly boys that pass’d—and the quarrelsome boys, 15
And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls—and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went.

His own parents,
He that had father’d him, and she that had conceiv’d him in her womb, and birth’d him,
They gave this child more of themselves than that; 20
They gave him afterward every day—they became part of him.

The mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table;
The mother with mild words—clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by;
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust;
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure, 25
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture—the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay’d—the sense of what is real—the thought if, after all, it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time—the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets—if they are not flashes and specks, what are they?
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank’d wharves—the huge crossing at the ferries,
The village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset—the river between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown, three miles off,
The schooner near by, sleepily dropping down the tide—the little boat slack-tow’d astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away solitary by itself—the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Spurned Goddess - Ted Walter

2009-12-08T07:21:00.000-08:00

Let us consider earth, explore the ache
That comes from losing touch with where we've been.
Fifteen billion years it took to make

the Earth from star-stuff, us. And now we take:
we overfish, we tamper with the gene.
Let us consider Earth, explore the ache.

Residual pesticides, a lifeless lake.
A forest burns to ash. Remember green?
Fifteen billion yeaars it took to make.

Forged first in cosmic fire we cannot fake
a species. Dead, it does not rise again.
Let us consider Earth, explore the ache.

Spurned Goddess, will our children learn to speak
her name in hope, honour her return?
Fifteen billion years it took to make

this peopled planet. Was it a mistake?
Will we find the slate can be wiped clean?
Let us consider Earth, explore the ache.
Fifteen billion years it took to make.

The South Downs, Ted Walter

2009-12-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

Long before names, before we thought of naming,
seas roared through, dividing Sussex Downs
from what is France: carving through millennia
of laid down life – this chalk, these flints, the land
we came to know as home. Long before that
the cosmos dreamed of consciousness, filled space
with elements that one day would lead to us.

Now every grain of soil, each artefact,
the air we breathe, the sweep of shadowed grass,
directly links us to our common birth,
and every crafted work, each photograph,
each stone we gather from a storm-washed beach,
points always back, reminds us of the time
it took to get here, step by step.

Self-portrait, David Whyte, 1992

2009-12-08T07:06:00.000-08:00

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

Loaves and Fishes - David Whyte 1999

2009-12-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

This is not
the age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

A vision - Wendell berry

2009-12-03T06:17:00.001-08:00

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility

Ode to autumn, Keats, 1819

2009-09-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies

Amo Ergo Sum by Kathleen Raine, 1952

2009-09-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

Amo Ergo Sum

Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love
The earth upon her astral spindle winds
Her ecstasy-producing dance.

Because I love
Clouds travel on the winds through wide skies,
Skies wide and beautiful, blue and deep.

Because I love
Wind blows white sails,
The wind blows over flowers, the sweet wind blows.

Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees.

Because I love
Larks rise up from the grass
And all the leaves are full of singing birds.

Because I love
The summer air quivers with a thousand wings,
Myriads of jewelled eyes burn in the light.

Because I love
The iridescnt shells upon the sand
Takes forms as fine and intricate as thought.

Because I love
There is an invisible way across the sky,
Birds travel by that way, the sun and moon
And all the stars travel that path by night.

Because I love
There is a river flowing all night long.

Because I love
All night the river flows into my sleep,
Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.