May 30, 2020

Other Languages

   They were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other languages
   as the Spirit gave them ability.
   -- Acts 2:4

Holy Spirit, loosen our tongues and teach us
new languages of love.
Help us to convey your grace across the divides of language,
and culture and race and class and identity.
Put the breath of love in our lungs,
the words of mercy on our tongues,
the songs of grace on our lips.
Help us give voice to blessing
that is clear in any language.
Give us grace to listen to every foreign tongue,
respect every foreign story, and honor every foreign soul,
for you have sent us to them,
so they may know their own belovedness,
and they may reveal to us our own.
Spirit of God, breathe in us.
Spirit of love, sing in us.
Spirit of justice, rise in us to do your will.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, May 28, 2020


May 29, 2020

No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thy own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne, public domain

Knoxville, Tennessee

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk and home-made ice cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep.

Nikki Giovanni, Black Feet, Black Talk, Black Judgment (HarperCollins Publishers, 1968)

May 26, 2020

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

Any Day Now

The tests results are due back
any day now.

Life is like a mouse,
sniffing around me,

and I am a doll,
on the floor, on my side,

lying where someone
has flung me.

At some point
the telephone will ring

and the wooden hinge
of my arm

will bend in its direction,
but I will let it go on ringing

for a moment
with that face at my neck

because I want to remember
at least once more

the scent of the lemon tree
in the back yard

and the view of the shoreline
on a windy day

and everything else
I've ever seen

in this world, which is so frightening
and wonderous.

Leah Browning, In the Chair Museum (Dancing Girl Press, 2013)

May 22, 2020

Big Eden

As surely as I know how to spell harvest,
I understand today that no matter our job titles,
our work is gardener: always the same.
Plant the seeds. Tend what grows. Nourish.
Pinch back. Repeat. What a gift to see, at last,
the size of the garden. What a gift
to be in service to the world -- to pull up
our sleeves, to smell the earth, to take
what we've been given and make it better,
to feed the others, to do it again.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, January 21, 2020

Virtual Nest

I know how to cut and paste.

This skill, acquired late in life,
allows me to forward articles from
a variety of journals and newspapers
to my grown children,

who, I suspect,
rarely open them.
I remain undaunted.

How else to keep them safe,
remind them to exercise,
get a colonoscopy,
get their teeth cleaned?

Hiding behind the work
of respected journalists
I nurture the delusion
that I am just a conduit
passing on vital information,

despite knowing what
my kids have known for years:
that I have miserably failed
to cap the angst of motherhood
to keep everyone I love perfectly
safe, always.

Miraculously, my sons
have mastered the
fine art of simultaneously loving,
ignoring, carrying on, as I

cut and paste,
hit send.

Anita S. Pulier, yourdailypoem.com, May 12, 2020

May 19, 2020

My brother comes to me

They are at the red gate
of my grandmother's white house
The gate is taller than them both
The mother, who is my mother, is holding her son's hand
The boy, who is my brother, is only four years old
She, our mother, is going crazy
She wants to take him with her
A blood stain has spread permanently on my brother's white shirt
I am at the steps of the house, like a bride
I am fifteen and calling to my brother, "Come to me"
Her teeth are bared They are not pearls
"I am your mother," she shouts
We are all crying and all our tears are all different
Our mother's hair is a flame above us

Typhanie Yanique, Wife (Peepal Tree Press, 2015)

When We Stop

Our normally busy street has been quiet
these days of sequestering.
But the other day traffic was backed up at the corner
with lots of honking. I went to investigate.
It was a teachers' parade, crossing our road,
threading through the neighborhoods of our town,
everybody distanced and in their own cars --
recognizing them for Teacher Appreciation Week.
I was moved, not just by the applauding,
not just the support for teachers
(who, like nurses, are as heroic as soldiers)
but this wonderful gift: that traffic stopped.

Even sequestered we can busy ourselves and forget
to stop.

When we stop and wait for others
in the gap we enlarge ourselves.
When the merely important stops for what is beautiful,
when we let a little sabbath interrupt our busyness
the holy enters in the empty spaces.

Stop, and let the Holy Spirit breathe in you.
Who knows? In the pause, angels may parade
the neighborhood of your soul.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, May 7, 2020

May 15, 2020

The Paper Clip

Something splendid about the way
it holds things together
with elasticity and torsion,
Such simple invention --
a steel wire bent on itself.
Less violent than a staple,
less permanent than glue.
But effective and elegant,
it does what I've so often
wished to do -- it unites.
It gently connects what is separate.
It doesn't leave a scar.
It maintains order and humbly
keeps the messy world composed.
And then, and here is where I fail,
it easily lets things go.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, April 14, 2020

The Order of the Day

The morning after a week of rain
and the sun shot down through branches
into the tall, bare windows.

The brindled cat rolled over on his back,
and I could hear you in the kitchen
grinding coffee beans into a powder.

Everything seemed especially vivid
because I knew we were all going to die,
first the cat, then you, then me,

then somewhat later the liquified sun
was the order I was envisioning.
But then again, you never really know.

The cat had a fiercely healthy look,
his coat so bristling and electric
I wondered what you had been feeding him

and what you had been feeding me
as I turned a corner
and beheld you out there on the sunny deck

lost in exercise, running in place,
knees lifted high, skin glistening --
and that toothy, immortal-looking smile of yours.

Billy Collins, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013)


May 12, 2020

Storage

When I moved from one house to another
there were many things I had no room
for. What does one do? I rented a storage
space. And filled it. Years passed.
Occasionally I went there and looked in,
but nothing happened, not a single
twinge of the heart.

As I grew older the things I cared
about grew fewer, but were more
important. So one day I undid the lock
and called the trash man. He took
everything.

I felt like the little donkey when
his burden is finally lifted. Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing -- the reason they can fly.

Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 2017)

a song in the front yard

I've stayed in the front yard all of my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets tired of a rose.

I want to go in the backyard now
And maybe down the alley,
Where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say its fine
How they don't have to go in at a quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George'll be taken to jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate.)

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.
And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (Harper Perennial Books, 1963)

May 08, 2020

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety --

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light --
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early: New Poems (Beacon Press, 2005)

The Last Time My Mother Lay Down With My Father

How did he touch my mother's body
once he knew he was dying? Woods white
with Juneberry and the question of how
to kiss the perishing world, where to place
his arms and accept the gentle washing
of the flesh. With her breast in hand
did he forgive with some semblance
of joy the final bit of fragrance
in the passing hour, the overwhelming
sweetness of multiflora rose and the press
of her skin against his?

The body's cartography is what we're given:
flesh sloughing into lines and folds, the contours
of its map-making. When at last he died,
summer's heat banking against the windows,
she'd been singing to him, her face near to his,
and because none of us wanted it to end,
we helped her climb into bed next to him
where she lifted his hand to her chest
and closed her eyes.

Todd Davis, Winterkill (Michigan State University Press, 2016)

May 05, 2020

When I was a Creek

When I was
a tree,

I sang and danced
with the wind
and offered
food and refuge
to all who came.

When I was
a cloud,

I floated freely
bringing
shade and rain
wherever they
were needed.

When I was
a creek,

I flowed effortlessly
around stones
and nourished life
everywhere
I went.

When I was
a seed,

I held
the story
of what
I would become
inside me

until the sun
and rain
let me know
it was time
to share.

When I was
a flower,

I opened up
to reveal
my beauty
and invited the bees
to share
my sweetness.

Now I am
human

and can do so
many things,

yet I am
full of questions
about who I am
and why I'm here.

Kai Siedenburg, Poems of Earth and Spirit: 70 Poems and 40 Practices To Deepen Your Connection with Nature (Our Nature Connection, 2017)




Where the Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

Rabindranath Tagore,  Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (Green Lotus, 2013) Originally published in 1912, the poet won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Written while Tagore's homeland, India, was under British rule, the poem beseeches the Almighty for a true freedom for his country.

May 01, 2020

Purple

In first grade Mrs. Lohr
said my purple tepee
wasn't realistic enough,
that purple was no color
for a tent,
that purple was a color
for people who died,
that my drawing wasn't
good enough
to hang with the others.
I walked back to my seat
counting the swish swish swishes
of my baggy corduroy trousers.
With a black crayon
nightfall came
to my purple tent
in the middle
of an afternoon.

In second grade Mr. Barta
said draw anything:
he didn't care what.
I left my paper blank
and when he came around
to my desk
my heart beat like a tom tom.
He touched my head
with his big hand
and in a soft voice said
the snowfall
how clean
and white
and beautiful.

Alex Rotella, copyright 1986

When This Is Over

When this is over,
may we never again
take for granted
A handshake with a stranger
Full shelves at the store
Conversations with neighbors
A crowded theater
Friday night out
The taste of communion
A routine checkup
The school rush each morning
Coffee with a friend
The stadium roaring
Each deep breath
A boring Tuesday
Life itself.

When this ends
may we find
that we have become
more like the people
we wanted to be
we were called to be
we hoped to be
and may we stay
that way -- better
for each other
because of the worst.

Laura Kelly Fanucci, originally published on laurakellyfanucci.com, reposted on journeywithjesus.com, January 26, 2020