Welcome Morning

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry, "hello there, Annie"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975)

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind --
the other half having flown back to Bohemia --

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what should I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume Two (Beacon Press, 2005)

In the Well

My father cinched the rope,
a noose around my waist,
and lowered me into
the darkness. I could taste

my fear. It tasted first
of dark, then earth, then rot.
I swung and struck my head
and at that moment got

another then: then blood,
which spiked my mouth with iron.
Hand over hand, my father
dropped me from then to then:

then water. Then wet fur,
which I hugged to my chest.
I shouted. Then Daddy hauled
the wet rope. I gagged, then pressed

my neighbor's missing dog
against me. I held its death
and rose up to my father.
Then light. Then hands. Then breath.


Andrew Hudgins, Southern Review, Vol.37, No. 2 Spring 2001

It Is I Who Must Begin

It is I who must begin.

Once I begin, once I try --

here and now,

right where I am,

not excusing myself

by saying things

would be easier elsewhere,

without grand speeches and

ostentatious gestures,

but all the more persistently

-- to live in harmony

with the "voice of Being," as I

understand it within myself

-- as soon as I begin that,

I suddenly discover,

to my surprise, that

I am neither the only one,

nor the first,

nor the most important one

to have set out

on that road.

Whether all is really lost

or not depends entirely on

whether or not I am lost.

Vaclav Havel, taken from Teaching with Fire, ed. S. M. Intrator and M. Scribner (Jossey Bass, 2003) 

Another Reason I Don't Keep A Gun in the House

The neighbor's dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic barking
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on the way out of the house.

The neighbor's dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast,
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins, The Apple that Astonished Paris (University of Arkansas Press, 1988)

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton, 2000)

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?


Robert Hayden, Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, ed. Frederick Glaysher (Liveright Publishing Corporation 1966)