Poetry

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.  It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. -Robert Frost

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The impulse for much writing is homesickness.  You are trying to get back home, and in your writing, you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.  -Joan Didion

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“We’re all writing out of a wound, and that’s where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We’re singing back to those who’ve been wounded.” – Dorianne Laux


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Neuropsychology can help to explain poetry, to demystify the impulse. There has been work done on why poetry can send shivers down our spine. The poem activates the same parts of the brain that react when a child is separated from its mother. A deep sense of separation and longing. -Sean Haldane, poet & neuropsychologist

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We come to the earth in an intensely vulnerable way, for birth is an act of separation. We are cast out into the emptiness as the cord is cut, yet the wound of connection remains open for the visitation of beauty. 

-John O’Donohue

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The longing of the heart is the memory of when we were together with our Beloved. The pain of separation is our awakening to the knowledge that somewhere we are united with God. Longing draws us from separation back to union, from our fragmented sense of self to the deeper wholeness of our true being. -Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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Robert Graves says that the job of the poem is to answer: “Who is the beloved?”

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The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human. -Linda Gregg

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I Loved You Before I Was Born

I loved you before I was born.

It doesn't make sense, I know.

I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.

And I've lived longing 

for your ever look ever since.

That longing entered time as this body. 

And the longing grew as this body waxed.

And the longing grows as the body wanes.

The longing will outlive this body.

I loved you before I was born.

It doesn't make sense, I know.

Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse

of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.

And I've been lonely for you from that instant.

That loneliness appeared on earth as this body. 

And my share of time has been nothing 

but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly. 

Your face fleeing my ever

kissing it firmly once on the mouth.

In longing, I am most myself, rapt,

my lamp mortal, my light 

hidden and singing. 

I give you my blank heart.

Please write on it

what you wish. 

-Li-Young Lee

I DRIVE ALONE FROM A MEETING WITH ARTISTS IN ELLENSBURG AND WRITE A POEM FOR THE LAST VALENTINE’S DAY OF YOUR 20’S. AS I DRIVE OVER THE SOUTH UMPTANUM RIDGE AND INTO THE VALLEY I OPEN MY JOURNAL IN THE DARK OF THE CAB WITH ONE HAND AND WITH THE OTHER I DRIVE. 

I WRITE:

I am not poor.

I loved you before the Cape and the whales, before the Yard

in Baltimore, before the mill in Krakow, before the choir

in Budapest, before the rest in Salzburg, before spring training

in Phoenix. I loved you before you graduated, before the dinner

in Langley, before the square in Prague, before the winters

in Montana, before the long summer days in Fairbanks.

I love you before, even, Selah.

There is a ridgeline that runs from pane to pane

in front of our house.

I love you like that.

There is a bird I wake on my way into school every morning.

Its wings startle me like I startle you when we kiss in the dark.

I love you like that, too.

I close my notebook.

Return my attention to the road until I’m home.

I drive through a snowstorm the next morning

as I prepare to talk to my class about metaphors.

I will show them Il Postino and tell them—

Write your own letters.

Flakes of snow, dense and wet, limit my vision.

Even with my brights on, I can’t see much.

It’s like I’m the only car on the road. 

As I reach the ridge my school is on,

the snow sticks a bit and I drive carefully.

Occasionally, I pass under the spires of pine trees

where the road is dry and my traction is sure.

The lights cut easily through the dark morning.

For brief moments, I can see perfectly.

This is how I love you.

-Dan Peters | The Reservoir

On Love (excerpt)   

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of 

loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of 

praise upon your lips.

-Kahlil Gibran

from How Beautiful The Beloved

Poem that opened you—

The opposite of a wound.

Didn’t the world

Come pouring through?

-Gregory Orr

Love Dogs

One night a man was crying, Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with praising,

until a cynic said, “So!

I’ve heard you calling our, but have you ever

gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick, green foliage.

“Why did you stop praising?” “Because

I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing you express

is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs

no one knows the names of.

Give your life

to be one of them.

-Rumi

A Blessing 

Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand.

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

-James Wright

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/trophos/3-02-a-blessing

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey

of afternoon light

flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off

its special mystery

in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists

so that it can be lost

and become precious.

-Lisel Mueller

I Would Like to Describe (excerpt)

I would like to describe the simplest emotion

joy or sadness

but not as others do

reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light

which is being born in me

but I know it does not resemble

any star

for it is not so bright

not so pure

and is uncertain

- Zbigniew Herbert

LET RAIN BE RAIN

Let rain be rain.

Let wind be wind. 

Let the small stone 

be the small stone.

May the bird 

rest on its branch, 

the beetle in its burrow.

May the pine tree 

lay down its needles. 

The rockrose, its petals.

It's early. Or it's late.

The answers 

to our questions 

lie hidden 

in acorn, oyster, the seagull's 

speckled egg.

We've come this far, already.

Why not let breath 

be breath. Salt be salt.

How faithful the tide 

that has carried us- 

that carries us now- 

out to sea and back.

- Danusha Laméris

Glen Uig

Believe in this couple this day who come 

to picnic in the Faery Glen. They pay rain 

no matter, or wind. They spread their picnic 

under a gale-stunted rowan. Believe they grew tired 

of giants and heroes and know they believe 

in wise tiny creatures who live under the rocks. 

Believe these odd mounds, the geologic joke 

played by those wise tiny creatures far from 

the world's pitiful demands: make money, stay sane. 

Believe the couple, by now soaked to the skin, 

sing their day as if dry, as if sheltered inside 

Castle Ewen. Be glad Castle Ewen's only a rock

that looks like a castle. Be glad for no real king. 

These wise tiny creatures, you'd better believe, 

have lived through it all: the Viking occupation, 

clan torturing clan, the Clearances, the World War 

II bomber gone down, a fiery boom 

on Beinn Edra. They saw it from here. They heard 

the sobs of last century's crofters trail off below 

where every day the Conon sets out determined for Uig. 

They remember the Viking who wandered off course, 

under the hazelnut tree hating aloud all he'd done. 

Some days dance in the bracken. Some days go out 

wide and warm on bad roads to collect the dispossessed 

and offer them homes. Some days celebrate addicts 

sweet in their dreams and hope to share with them 

a personal spectrum. The loch here's only a pond, 

the monster is in it small as a wren. 

Believe the couple who have finished their picnic 

and make wet love in the grass, the tiny wise creatures 

cheering them on. Believe in milestones, the day 

you left home forever and the cold open way 

a world wouldn't let you come in. Believe you 

and I are that couple. Believe you and I sing tiny 

and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.

-Richard Hugo

Communion

Dogwood blossoms down the street

have opened with their purple centers laid out—

mixed in white and pink their large petals falling

and overlapping over and over

the color of mouths, the inside of a cheek

I want to slip them in my mouth

and feel the soft subtle veins—

their silk made from minerals

turned white.

It would be a simple communion

Line my lungs with them

I will accept them in this way.

kcmp

Last Night As I Was Sleeping

Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt—blessed illusion—

that I had a beehive here

in my heart.

And that 

the golden bees were making 

white combs and sweet honey

from my old failures.

-Antonio Machado

Translated by Robert Bly 

Messenger

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me

keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

that we live forever.

-Mary Oliver

Reading with Little Sister:  A Recollection

The stars have died overhead in their great cold.

Beneath us the sled whispers along.  Back there

our mother is gone.  They tell us, “If you hold on

the dogs will take you home.”  And they tell us never

to cry.  We’ll die too, they say, if we

are ever afraid.  All night we hold on.

The stars go down.  We are never afraid.

-William Stafford

Manna

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,

a world becoming white, no more sounds,

no longer possible to find the heart of the day,

the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all

I wanted in life – so be it – whatever it is

that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever

blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am

grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,

palms up, I know it is impossible to hold

for long what we love of the world, but look

at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,

see how the snow drifts down, look how happy 

I am. 

-Joseph Stroud

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.

-Mary Oliver

Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm

So that each

is its own, now—each has fallen, blond stillness.

Closer, above them,

the damselflies pass as they would over water, 

if the fruit were water,

or as bees would, if they weren't

somewhere else, had the fruit found

already a point more steep

in rot, as soon it must, if

none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only 

softens further those parts where flesh

goes soft.

There are those

whom no amount of patience looks likely

to improve ever, I always said, meaning

gift is random, 

assigned here, 

here withheld—almost always

correctly

as it's turned out: how your hands clear

easily the wreckage;

how you stand—like a building for a time condemned,

then deemed historic. Yes. You

will be saved.

-Carl Phillips

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

-Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

We Have Not Long to Love

We have not long to love. 

Light does not stay. 

The tender things are those 

we fold away. 

Coarse fabrics are the ones 

for common wear. 

In silence I have watched you 

comb your hair. 

Intimate the silence, 

dim and warm. 

I could but did not, reach 

to touch your arm. 

I could, but do not, break 

that which is still. 

(Almost the faintest whisper 

would be shrill.) 

So moments pass as though 

they wished to stay. 

We have not long to love. 

A night. A day.... 

-Tennessee Williams

This Moment

A neighbourhood.

At dusk.

Things are getting ready

to happen

out of sight.

Stars and moths.

And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.

One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child

who has run into her arms

this moment

Stars rise.

Moths flutter.

Apples sweeten in the dark.

-Eavan Boland

Big Clock (excerpt)

Crossing between gain and loss:

learning new words for the world and the things in it.

Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.

And collecting words in a different language

for those three primary colors:

staying, leaving, and returning.

-Li-Young Lee 

Beannacht

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colours,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

-John O’Donohue

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

-David Wagoner

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

Who has it, and who doesn’t?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater

who loves her children?

Why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?

-Mary Oliver

Summer Solstice, New York City

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,

he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building

and over the soft, tarry surface

to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice

and said if they came a step closer that was it.

Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,

the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,

and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a

black shell around his own life,

life of his children's father, in case

the man was armed, and one, slung with a

rope like the sign of his bounden duty,

came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building

like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,

and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.

The tallest cop approached him directly,

softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,

while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world

and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the

hairy net with its implacable grid was

unfolded near the curb and spread out and

stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at a birth.

Then they all came a little closer

where he squatted next to his death, his shirt

glowing its milky glow like something

growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then

everything stopped

as his body jerked and he

stepped down from the parapet and went toward them

and they closed on him, I thought they were going to

beat him up, as a mother whose child has been

lost will scream at the child when it's found, they

took him by the arms and held him up and

leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the

tall cop lit a cigarette

in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and

then they all lit cigarettes, and the

red, glowing ends burned like the

tiny campfires we lit at night

back at the beginning of the world.  

-Sharon Olds

Kindness (excerpt)

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

-William Stafford

Such Singing in the Wild Branches 

It was spring

and finally I heard him

among the first leaves—

then I saw him clutching the limb

in an island of shade

with his red-brown feathers

all trim and neat for the new year.

First, I stood still

and thought of nothing.

Then I began to listen.

Then I was filled with gladness—

and that's when it happened,

when I seemed to float,

to be, myself, a wing or a tree—

and I began to understand

what the bird was saying,

and the sands in the glass

stopped

for a pure white moment

while gravity sprinkled upward

like rain, rising,

and in fact

it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing—

it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed

not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers,

and also the trees around them,

as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds

in the perfectly blue sky— all, all of them

were singing.

And, of course, yes, so it seemed,

so was I.

Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn't last

for more than a few moments.

It's one of those magical places wise people

like to talk about.

One of the things they say about it, that is true,

is that, once you've been there,

you're there forever.

Listen, everyone has a chance.

Is it spring, is it morning?

Are there trees near you,

and does your own soul need comforting?

Quick, then— open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song

may already be drifting away.

-Mary Oliver

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward 

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

-Li-Young Lee

Into Everything

A stream of near-black pelicans

skim the crests of waves—

their wingtips almost kissing

the surface, a dance

their bodies and feathers 

seem to know without effort.

The roar of the sea fills my 

ears and body like jets flying

in every direction.

Rose wears a blue bonnet,

matches her eyes, the sky, the sea.

I hold her hand in the misty wind

barefoot, facing the ocean.

We watch water break 

and roll to us and when it

reaches our feet, I say,

Hello, wave.

And then suddenly, it’s you

washing over our feet and 

running up the beach

smoothing out

and away

into everything.

-kcmp

“This longing you express

is the return message.” -Rumi

Homing

Last spring, Bren, just after you died,

I met a tree swallow between the two lakes.

He was so still and sang to me for so long

that I told him to tell you I love you.

Yesterday, tree swallows returned

their white bellies flashing over the river,

the blue on their backs ablaze in the sun.

And isn’t their blue just your blue,

in flight, winging over the water.

kcmp

Constellations

In an upswell of wind, doves loop up 

while a hawk darts through low—clear 

through the neighborhood, follows 

a line only it knows. And flickers 

and one cedar waxwing—

its feathers a glow of cinnamon, 

like you, Bren,

summer in the snow.

At the ball field, I sit in the dugout, 

look at the field of white. Wind whistles 

pure tones through the tops 

of poles like glass bottles, breath 

along the edges, ringing out.

Yesterday, a magpie at the topmost 

branch. Still and striking, 

tail feathers so elegant. 

I said hello to you.

Some may say that my seeing you 

in birds is just the way

humans make meaning 

out of disparate things

grasping at the air 

to make a false scaffolding 

like pictures in the sky,

but are not the birds I find also 

a constellation, and don’t they, too, 

make a map that orients to all things

and are not you, too, bones against the blue sky

my darling cirrus vertebrates, connecting everything.

kcmp

Interbeing

The sun has entered me.

The sun has entered me together with the cloud and the river.

I myself have entered the river,

and I have entered the sun

with the cloud and the river.

There has not been a moment

when we do not interpenetrate.

But before the sun entered me,

the sun was in me—

also the cloud and the river.

Before I entered the river,

I was already in it.

There has not been a moment

when we have not inter-been.

Therefore you know

that as long as you continue to breathe,

I continue to be in you.

-Thich Nhat Hanh