Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
~ from Morning Has Broken by Yusuf Islam
When no one is in my room
I become sprightly
Smile to myself
And dance a silence with the stillness
We spin in secret, easy wildness
~ from A Silence by Leib Kvitko
From now on,
It’s all clear profit,
every sky.
~ Robert Hass
See “Your Heart Is Fine” by Joanne Kyger
See “Swan and Shadow” by John Hollander
Advice
by Langston Hughes
Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean –
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
Like a great
starving beast
My body is quivering
Fixed
On the scent
of
Light.
~ Hafiz
On the Nature of Understanding
by Kay Ryan
Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it's
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal
See “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” by William Wordsworth
“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
~ Vincent van Gogh
"My dear young fellow,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, 'there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet."
~ from James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Praise
by Robert Hass
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
'I think I shall praise it.'
Threadsuns
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
~ by Paul Celan
"The first duty is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.
~ Oscar Wilde
See “You’re” by Sylvia Plath
See “The Fish” by Mary Oliver
See “cutting greens” by Lucille Clifton
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
~ Jelalludin Rumi
Transients
By Deborah Gordon Cooper
We are just passing through
these bones,
the way this wind
inhabits the ravine,
the way this light, in its
allotted time, illuminates
the hollow.
We are just passing through
these bones,
folding and opening
these limbs.
We work these hands,
making our sandwiches
and love;
look out at one another
from these faces,
watch a raven
trace the sky.
See “The Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan
See Praise the Rain by Joy Harjo
walking with the river
the water does my thinking
~ Bob Boldman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
~ Walt Whitman
See “In the Month of May” by Robert Bly
I tried on the summer sun
Felt good
Nice and warm -- knew it would
Tried the grass beneath bare feet
Felt neat
Finally, finally felt well dressed
Nature's clothes fit me best.
~ from Tryin’ On Clothes by Shel Silverstein
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
