March 31, 2020

The Promise

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

Flatten the Curve: A Plague Poem

How heroic are the grocery clerks
And the fast-food fry cooks
How brave are the ordinary workers
And the priests wandering through empty churches
How courageous are UPS drivers who risk their lives
How stoic are the cashiers and the bus drivers
And there's no way to thank them all
All will be well once we unbend the horizon
I weep when I see a happy baby
Blissful and unaware that the Angel of Death
Is trying to erase the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
How tender are the smiles of life
How wonderful the professional calm of nurses
How sublime the persistence of doctors
How moving the faces of anxious waiting
How close we are in our distance
I want to use big words for such big feelings
But the words keep getting smaller and smaller
Flatten the curve and rise up

Hilton Obenzinger, blog.bestamericanpoems.com, March 23, 2020

March 27, 2020

The Most Important Thing

Just two weeks ago, it was sufficient
to say hello, good morning, good-bye.
But now, in every text, every email,
every phone call I tell my friends
and family how much I love them.
I tell them life is better because
they are in it. I say it with the urgency
of a woman who knows she could die,
who knows this communication could be our last.
I slip bouquets into my voice. I weave love songs
into the spaces between words.
I infuse every letter, every comma, with prayers.
Sometimes it makes me cry, not
out of fear, but because the love is so strong.
How humbling to feel it undiluted,
shining, like rocks in the desert after a rain,
to know love as the most important thing,
to remember this as I keep on living.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com, March 22,2020

March 24, 2020

Lockdown

Yes, there is fear.
Yes, there is isolation
Yes, there is panic buying.
Yes, there is sickness.
Yes, there is even death.
But - - -

They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after only a few weeks of quiet
the sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.

They say that in the streets of Assisi
people are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sound of family around them.

They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.

Today a young woman I know
is busy spreading flyers with her number
through the neighborhood
so that the elders may have someone to call on.

Today churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples
are preparing to welcome
and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.

All over the world, people are slowing down and reflecting.
All over the world, people are looking at their neighbors in a new way.
All over the world, people are waking up to a new reality,
to how big we really are,
to how little control we really have,
to what really matters,
to Love.

So we pray and remember that
yes, there is fear
but there does not have to be hate.
Yes, there is isolation
but there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes, there is panic buying
but there does not have to be meanness.
Yes, there is sickness
but there does not have to be sickness of the soul.
Yes, there is even death
but there can always be a rebirth of love.

Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen behind the factory noises of your panic.
The birds are singing again,
the sky is clearing,
spring is coming,
and we are always encompassed by love.

Open the windows of your soul
and though you may not able to touch
across the empty square,
Sing.

Richard Hendrick, sunfellow.com, March 16, 2020

March 20, 2020

First Day of Spring (or Autumn)

Holy One, you are my shepherd;
        I shall not want.
You make me lie down in green pastures;
        You lead me beside still waters;
You restore my soul.
                                     Psalm 23:1-3a

Things change. Seasons turn. Life goes on.
But your will for our wholeness is steadfast.
You shepherd us through dark valleys,
but we shall come to green pastures.

On this first day of a new season
I open my heart
to your turning of the earth within me,
the always-renewing of life.

The shadows I see are not everything.
The valleys I pass through are not the end.
All things you renew, all things you transform.
I give myself up to your shepherding.

You bury the seeds of joy in me.
I pray for trust.
I wait with you for their fruiting.
I pray for hope.

Fully present in this present moment,
I surrender to the gentle tipping of the earth,
the green pasture I can't yet see,
your unseen grace emerging even now.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, March 19. 2020                                    

Open-Hearted

A nest of tubes,
a cradle of monitors,
someone in there
whose breastbone has been pulled open
like French Doors,
and whose heart, almost broken,
has been handled,
and laid bare,
in front of strangers.

Heart laid bare,
the weakest walls exposed
and shored up,
clogged arteries
discovered and cleared.
Heart handled,
put back
for its red roots
to settle.

The days after,
each beat wonders
will I live?
Every breath hurts.
The months after, each beat waits
for the seals to set,
for the scar,
like a mummy's mouth,
silent ceiling over the
hidden stiches,
to pale a little,
to flatten and soften its grimace
a little.
The years after,
street clothes hide it,
hide the question
will I live?
Will this heart sustain me
in the sprints of joy,
the sweats of panic?

The psalm says
Open hearted,
the good person gives to the poor.
We stand,
survivors of less visible repairs,
looking in at the nest of tubes,
following the arpeggio of beats
on the monitor.

Anne Higgins, At the Year's Elbow (Wipf & Stock Pub, 2006)

March 17, 2020

No Distance

In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.
                                                  1 Corinthians 12:13

Our social distancing is an illusion.
We are one. There is no distance. No gap.
Isolated in your apartment, you belong.

You breathe and it fills my lungs.
You weep and my heart is broken.
We are one body in many places.

In this time of separation we open our hearts,
we allow ourselves to flow out from our bodies
in Spirit to one another, to the strangers

who are part of us. Like the Italians
singing from their balconies with neighbors,
we are all notes of the same song.

Love flows where germs cannot. Meditate
on our amazing unity. Extend your spirit
to include all it includes: the whole world.

Breathe in this breath (so threatened!), a gift.
Breathe out this breath (so released!), a gift.
Let compassion for all beings flow with it,

in and out, refreshing your whole body,
the Body of Christ, the whole human family,
the whole Creation. Let love be our body.

Let your love take flesh. Make calls.
Write letters. And when you come back out
don't stop being one another's body. It's your life.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, March 16, 2020



Living It

First and foremost, you must listen to your own rhythm, and
try to live in accordance with it. Be attentive to what emerges
from deep down. Often, our actions are only imitations,
fulfillment of an assumption of duty, or a reflection
of what we believe a human being "should" be.

But the only certainty we may have about our life
and our deeds can only spring from the depth of our being.

I know that a new and kinder day will come,
and I would like so much to live on,
if only to express all the love I carry within me.

And there is only one way to prepare the new age,
by living it even now in our hearts.

We must be willing to act like a balm for all wounds.

Etty Hillesum, beautywelove.blogspot.com, July 19, 2019

Etty Hillesum was a Dutch author whose diaries of the early 1940's record the increasing anti-Jewish measures imposed by the occupying German army and her growing anxiety about the fate of fellow Jews who had been deported by them. On September 7, 1943, the family was deported to Auschwitz. Etty's parents are recorded as having died on September 10, suggesting that they either died in transit or were gassed immediately upon arrival. Her brother Mischa was moved to the Warsaw Ghetto where he died before March 31, 1944. Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943.


March 13, 2020

stubborn praise

And so today I praise
the mango that molders,
how sweet it is the moment just before
it is gone. I praise the shovel
for its valiant attempt
to make a clearing
even as the snow continues
to fall. Praise the fire,
though it always goes out
when left untended.
Praise how easily I forget the lessons
I learned yesterday,
how this allows me to learn them again.
Praise the body which rises
and runs, though it knows
it will tire and ache. Praise
the innocent clock
which only does what it
was made to do. And praise
this longing to praise --
how it has never built
a single house nor fed a mouth
nor loaded a train
but, oh, the joy,
the aliveness in praising.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, February 7, 2020

Practice, More Practice

And if I snap at you about the soap
in the wrong place or the toaster
not being put away or how we
are late, it is simply that I have forgotten
the inner spaciousness of everything.
I have forgotten the poem inside everything.

And if I mutter and pace and stiffen,
if I prick and fuss and pout,
it is because I simply do not remember
how essential it is to let myself
be broken, how a sweet alchemy
is happening in me even now.

There are days when I lose sight
of how beautiful it is, this chance
to get things wrong, this gift
of making mistakes so that I might learn.
And all that I don't yet know grows wings --
it will choose when and where it lands.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, January 27, 2020

March 11, 2020

Virus

What if you tried to stay spotless
from one strain and were marked
by a completely different one instead?
What if you are a carrier?
What if no amount of washing,
even a baptism by immersion,
can remove the germ in you,
silently replicating,
passing to everyone you touch,
outfoxing the authorities,
leaping boundaries,
outpacing all our defenses,
changing you forever?
What if you self-quarantine
and it still gets into you,
whether or not you are prepared,
or worthy, or strong enough,
upsetting your life,
your plans, your control?
What if you're too late,
you've already eaten the bread,
unwashed, drunk undefended?
What if by some impossible turn
or some ordinary encounter
it has infected you
and you need to be careful
in touching people
because it spreads,
and soon it will change the world,
this living entity,
with a life and will of its own,
gushing up to eternal life,
this virus of divine love?

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, March 11, 2020

March 10, 2020

How to Triumph Like a Girl

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let's be honest, I like
that they're ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don't you want to believe it?
Don't you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it's going to come in first.

Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)

Degas Wants to Paint Me Ironing

He says it's wonderful to watch me,
I'll just bet it is
when I'm the one who's working.

He's going to pay me, pay me to pretend
and now that I'm pretending
I have time to wonder
how my ironing has changed.

First with little flutters of the heart,
rounding the collars, love details
for the man, the loved one.

Some days my belly so far out
I'd barely touch the table,
slow heavy sweeps just shy of burning;
I was tired in those days.

Then my first deliberate scorch,
joy of a brown triangle on linen,
that smell a second before smoke;
ha that was wickedness, his favorite shirt,
he slapped my face for that, but it was worth it.

And ironing some things for the last time,
small nightgowns of disease.
How carefully I did them
folding my heart into the pleats,
pressing my good-byes into the sleeves.

Anna-May Laugher, andotherpoems.com, November 19, 2012

This poem is an example of ekphrastic poetry -- poetry which is based on another art form, usually a painting. Here Laugher has taken as her point of departure a painting by Degas entitled "Woman Ironing." To see the painting click here.

March 06, 2020

One-Legged Pigeon

In a flock on Market,
just below Union Square,
the last to land
and standing a little canted,
it teetered -- I want to say now
though its hardly true --
like Ahab toward the starboard
and regarded me
with blood-red eyes.
We all lose something,
though that day
I hadn't lost a thing.
I saw in that imperfect bird
no antipathy, no envy, no vengeance.
It needed no pity,
but just a crumb,
something to hop toward.

Gary Whitehead, A Glossary of Chickens: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2013)

And She Dances

Like a wounded bird you sit propped
in a hospital bed in the middle
of your bedroom, beloved Siamese cat
at your side, the sound of oxygen
pumping, a long plastic lifeline
connected to the machine which helps you
breathe, thumping melodic sounds --
background music to the rhythms of
your heart.

You are angered and saddened by this disease
called ALS that robs you of your life and
your fifty years as a dancer.
Long-legged beauty shown in photos
on the wall, face the light, next to
grinning grandchildren.

You say that you are afraid of dying.
Afraid of the unknown.
So together we close our eyes and try
to imagine a place where you are whole,
where your limbs move at your command.

Where you take your mother's hand
and dance again.

Josie Rodriguez, Waiting Rooms of the Heart: Poems of a Health Care Chaplin (iUniverse, Inc., 2005)

March 04, 2020

Bach and My Father

Six days a week my father sold shoes
To support our family through depression and war,
Nursed his wife through years of Parkinson's,
Loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
Never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
Was on the stereo. He listened with care --
Brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
Moving his right hand in time. He would have
Risen to dance if he had known how.

"Beautiful," he said when it was done,
My father, who had never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
Just in time he said, "That's beautiful."

Paul Zimmer, Crossing to Sunlight Revisited (University of Georgia Press, 2007)

Swift Things Are Beautiful

Swift things are beautiful:
Swallows and deer,
And lightning that falls
Bright-veined and clear,
Rivers and meteors,
Wind in the wheat,
The strong-withered horse,
The runner's sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
The closing of day,
The pause of the wave
That curves downward to spray,
The ember that crumbles,
The opening flower,
And the ox that moves on
In the quiet of power.

Elizabeth Coatsworth