Poems

In Beyond Words: The Poem as Awakener, Kim Rosen writes, “Stanley Kunitz, perhaps the current father of American poetry, has said that the task of the poem is not only to undo clichés of language, but also to undo clichés of thought and feeling. Our clichés, our patterns of mind, bind us to the behaviors that perpetuate suffering in our own lives and the life of our species. True poetry thus becomes a force of awakening. It speaks heart to heart and reinvents the mind on the way.”

I agree with her, and offer this small selection of poems in the hope that they may serve you in that manner.

The City Limits (A.R. Ammons)

Blessing the Boats (Lucille Clifton)

Testimony (James Galvin)

Please Call Me By My True Names (Thich Naht Hanh)

The Beloved is Inside You (Kabir)

From Blossoms (Li-Young Lee)

O Taste and See (Denise Levertov)

Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty (Jane Mead)

So Much Happiness (Naomi Shihab Nye)

The Journey (Mary Oliver)

Wild Geese (Mary Oliver)

A Physics of Sudden Light (Alberto Rios)

A Fire On The Left (Rumi)

Touch (Ruth L. Schwartz)

Dog on the Floor in the Pet Food Aisle (Ruth L. Schwartz)

Stones (Ruth L. Schwartz)

Ask Me (William Stafford)

Love After Love (Derek Walcott)

The Well of Grief (David Whyte)


The City Limits
(A.R. Ammons)

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tine with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

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Blessing the Boats
(Lucille Clifton)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

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Testimony
(James Galvin)

You can't step into the same
River even once,
And why would you want to? You can't
Lie down without turning your back
On someone. The sun slips
Like butter in a pan.

The eastern sky arrives
On the back stoop in its dark
Suit. It draws itself up
Full height to present its double
Rainbow like an armful of flowers.
Thank you, they're lovely.

I step outside where the wind
Lifts my hair and it's just
Beginning to rain in the sun,
And the earth silvers like a river
We're in, I swear to God,
And you can't step out of a river
Either. Not once.

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Please Call Me by My True Names
(Thich Nhat Hanh)

Don't say that I will depart tomorrow.
Even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
To be a bud on a Spring branch,
To be tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
Learning to sing in my new nest,
To be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
To be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
To fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.

I am a mayfly metamorphosing
On the surface of the river.
And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond
And I am the grass snake
That silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
My legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant
Selling deadly weapons to Uganda

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
Refugee on a small boat,
Who throws herself into the ocean
After being raped by a sea pirate
And I am the pirate,
My heart not yet capable
Of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo
With plenty of power in my hands
And I am the man who has to pay
His “debt of blood” to my people
Dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
It makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names
So I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
So I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
So I can wake up
And the door of my heart
Can be left open,
The door of compassion.

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The Beloved is Inside You
(Kabir)

The beloved is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself and others fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken.
Inside Love there is more joy than we know.
Rain pours down; though the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single love.
How hard it is to feel all that joy in our bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it, fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word “reason,” you already feel miles away.

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From Blossoms
(Li-Young Lee)

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.

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O Taste and See
(Denise Levertov)

The world is
Not with us enough.
“O taste and see”

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

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Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty
(Jane Mead)

What struck me first was their panic.

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of their stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars —

and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that — dead —
their own feathers blowing, clotting

in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some —
I lingered there beside her for five miles.

She had pushed her head through the space
between bars — to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back

of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she's being taken along.
She craned her neck.

She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car — strained
to see what happened beyond.

That is the chicken I want to be.

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So Much Happiness
(Naomi Shihab Nye)

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of dust and noise
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

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The Journey
(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.

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Wild Geese
(Mary Oliver)

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.

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A Physics of Sudden Light
(Alberto Rios)

This is just about light, how suddenly
One comes upon it sometimes and is surprised.

In light, something is lifted.
That is the property of light,

And in it one weighs less.
A broad and wide leap of light

Encountered suddenly, for a moment —
You are not where you were

But you have not moved. It's the moment
That startles you up out of dream, makes you

Close your eyes — that kind of light, the moment
For which, in our language, we have only

The word surprise, maybe a few others,
But not enough. The moment is regular

As with all the things regular
At the closing of the twentieth century:

A knowledge that electricity exists
Somewhere inside the walls;

That tonight the moon in some fashion will come out;
That cold water is good to drink.

The way taste slows a thing
On its way into the body.

Light, widened and slowed, so much of it: It
Cannot be swallowed into the mouth of the eye,

Into the throat of the pupil, there is
So much of it. But we let it in anyway,

Something in us knowing
The appropriate mechanism, the moment's lever.

Light, the slow moment of everything fast.
Like hills, those slowest waves, light,

That slowest fire, all
Confusion, confusion here

One more part of clarity; In this light
You are not where you were but you have not moved.

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A Fire on the Left
(Rumi)

A fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire, another
toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which are not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under on the water's surface, that head pokes out
of the fire.

Most people guard against going into the fire,
and so end up in it.
Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion
are cheated with this reversal.

The trickery goes further.
The voice in the fire tells the truth, saying I am not fire,
I am fountainhead. Come into me, and don't mind the sparks.
Somehow, each gives the appearance
of the other. To these eyes you have now,
what looks like water burns. What looks like fire
is a great relief to be inside.

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Touch
(Ruth L. Schwartz)

The skin
and the serious organs beneath it
cannot help themselves; we rise
to our own surfaces

in small, daring, dazzled blips
like the fat spring frogs which pause
between the leaves of watercress
and mint — then dive

kicking deep again. What if we could
transform like that? you ask, as even fatter tadpoles
waddle, wiggle legless selves

through the water's
waiting skin. Or maybe we can,
you answer yourself. Fervent
as we are

in this incarnation,
in this ardent flesh.

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Dog on the Floor in the Pet Food Aisle
(Ruth L. Schwartz)

It's so simple, really,
the tenderness we need
lives everywhere,
there is no place it does not live,

              and we seek it
savagely,
and we flail and hurl and fling
ourselves toward the brass ring of it,
as if it were a narrow chance,
a shining and unlikely prize...

It is hard to pinch the air
between our fingers, but we are determined.
It is hard to survive by denying
ourselves, but we are accustomed.
It is hard to live inside the flawed
and gritty chambers we believe ourselves to be,
but we have strapped our bodies in,
we watch our lives through airplane windows,
small and dim and scarred,

              and even so, life noses up,
rolling before us
like a black dog,
its brown eyes steady as the sun,
its belly in the air, asking for touch.

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Stones
(Ruth L. Schwartz)

One morning we wake up
after weeks of flood,

our rivers huge,
purpled with mud,

every sacred desert
turned to marsh.

Hawks wheel overhead
in the new sky,

and egrets — whiter than ever before —
step into the water,

bleaching our eyes cleaner than bone
in their wild light.

Some of the ideas we had
about how we wanted to live our lives

were never large enough
to hold us.

Some of the stones we find are eggs,
lined with furled wings.

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Ask Me
(William Stafford)

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

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Love After Love
(Derek Walcott)

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, Sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes:
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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The Well of Grief
(David Whyte)

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the wall of grief

turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

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