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The Journey by Mary Oliver
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.
To be of use Marge Piercy
The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
"Lost" [by David Wagoner]
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
The Meadow Mouse - Poem by Theodore
Roethke
1
In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.
Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
Blackberry Eating
Galway Kinnell, 1927 - 2014
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched ,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
Deep in the Quiet Wood
James Weldon Johnson, 1871 - 1938
Are you bowed down in heart?
Do you but hear the clashing discords and the din of life?
Then come away, come to the peaceful wood,
Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,
From out the palpitating solitude
Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?
They are above, around, within you, everywhere.
Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.
They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.
Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale
Until, responsive to the tonic chord,
It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ,
Filling earth for you with heavenly peace
And holy harmonies.
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as yod taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
The Search for Words Kiley Harrison
As a child, I asked again
and again where words
came from. Who made the word
rhododendron? Who first spoke
somnambulist?
I followed my parents through
grocery stores, asking,
but they never knew how to answer,
searched for what cheese to buy,
what milk, what cereal.
I would ask,
but why do we call it milk?
Who decided on ice cream,
grocery, marmalade, cracker?
My mother would say
someone who lived long before us,
my father said,
it came from Latin.
Who is this Latin? Or what, or when, or how?
Who saw shapes
in the sky and first whispered cloud?
Who bent to mysteries from the ground
and said gardenia, lavender, sunflower, lily?
Who first saw a child walk, a lengthy woman,
a sunrise, and said aloud love?
Who first rose in the morning
and whispered begin?
Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
through thicknesses of black-
and as it pierced
the heavy ceiling of the soil-
and launched itself
up into outer space -
no
one
even
clapped.
--Marcie Hans
THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET
is the usual thing to say when you begin
pulling on the toes of a small child,
and I have never had a problem with that.
I could easily picture the piggy with his basket
and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.
What always stopped me in my tracks was
the middle toe -- this little piggy ate roast beef.
I mean I enjoy a roast beef sandwich
with lettuce and tomato and a dollop of horseradish,
but I cannot see a pig ordering that in a delicatessen.
by Billy Collins from Ballistics (Random House)
“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well.
He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can
see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I
think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me
too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the
beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine
the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty
at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure,
also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate
it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense
also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science
knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't
understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard Feynman
You've seen a herd of goats
going down to the water.
The lame and dreamy goat
brings up the rear.
There are worried faces about that one,
but now they're laughing.
because look, as they return,
that goat is leading!
There are many different kinds of knowing.
The lame goat's kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of presence.
