In Return

          What can you give in return for your life?

                         —Mark 8.37

In our money-made world
we understand transaction.
We're ready to make a deal.
What then do we do
with an incommensurate, unanswerable gift?
What can you give in return for your life?
Only your life,
full of what only you can put into it.

Yet think of what we exchange for life.
The way we trade in real life
for the feeling of being liked,
or right, or safe, or worthy.
It's a cheap imitation. Don't buy it.

Receive the gift,
cherish it—
and give it away.
It will be given again to you,
newer, brighter, a good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, running over,
over and over.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net. September 13, 2024

Anagrammer

If you believe in the magic of language, then Elvis really Lives and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin. If you believe the letters themselves contain a power within them, then you understand what makes outside tedious, how desperation becomes a rope ends it. The circular logic that allows senator to become treason, and treason to become atoners. That eleven plus two is twelve plus one, and an admirer is also married. That if you could just rearrange things the right way you’d find your true life, the right path, the answer to your questions: you’d understand how the Titanic turns into that ice tin, and debit card becomes bad credit. How listen is the same as silent, and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

 

Peter Pereira, Poetry Foundation Newsletter September 6, 2024

At the Toll Booth

They are serving Toll House cookies
at the toll booth on the Maine Turnpike.
Someone peeps out through pleated drapes
of a swollen ebony hearse
to see if there is some mistake.
But no, attendants are moving
deftly among clogged cars
balancing silver trays heaped high
with succulent cookies
still warm with chocolate oozing
over the fluted rims.
Small dogs gather to catch the excess
as cars continue to pile up
even in the exact change lane
yet no one seems to mind the delay,
The Toll House cookies are golden and good.
The withered face peering out
from the silent hearse
fills with delicate memories
of an uncomplicated childhood.

 

Marilyn Donnelly, Coda (Autumn House Press, 2010)

Spiritual

It all counts as practice—

the way you stack clean dishes 

in the drainer so they won’t break, 

how you wipe down the counter 

and fold the towels. How you talk 

to a co-worker, or your husband 

after a hard day, saying to him: 

You can lay your head in my lap, then 

spending the rest of the evening

rubbing his temples to release

the pain locked inside. And isn’t this

as sacred an act as bowing to a statue 

of the Buddha, or standing in line 

for hours just to touch the worn 

bronze toe of St. Peter in Rome, 

believing that single gesture might

bless the rest of your life?

 

James Crews, ‘The Weekly Pause’ August 2, 2024 

The World Loves You Back

Even if no one ever touched you

with the tenderness you needed,

believe that the world’s been

holding you in its arms since

the day you were born. You are

not an accident, or afterthought.

Let rain on the roof remind you.

Let sun on the skin, and the neon-

orange of the Mexican sunflower

at which a hummingbird pauses

to drink. There are so many ways

to hold and be held, and you

could spend your whole life

tallying them up, without ever

reaching the end of the list.

 

James Crews, Unlocking the Heart (Mandala Publishing, 2024)

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

 

Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co 2015)

Erasers

As punishment, my father said, the nuns
     would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day's erasers.

Punishment? The pounding symphony
     of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead

(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
     powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)

was more than remedy, it was reward
     for all the hours they'd sat
without a word (except for passing notes)

and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
     black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk

baton, the only one who got to talk.
     Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,

poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
     My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black

chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
     those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices

gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
     can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell

this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
     who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.

 

Mary Jo Salter, Open Shutter (2003)