A Light exists in Spring

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –––
When March is scarcely here

~Emily Dickinson, (1830 – 1886)

 

so much light

In loving memory of the ever-luminous Mary Oliver…

I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us–

~Mary Oliver, (1935 – 2019)

Keeping Quiet: a poem to mark the solstice

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would not look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

~Pablo Neruda, (1904 – 1973)

listen

I think I will do nothing for a long time but
listen,
And accrue what I hear into myself…. and let
sound contribute toward me.

~Walt Whitman, (1819 – 1892)

lie down by a slow river

The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees-
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.

~Mary Oliver

Hurt no living thing

Hurt no living thing:

Ladybird, nor butterfly,

Nor moth with dusty wing,

Nor cricket chirping cheerily,

Nor grasshopper so light of leap,

Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,

Nor harmless worms that creep.

~Christina Rossetti, (1830 – 1894)

with an eye made quiet

. . . with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

~William Wordsworth, (1770 – 1850)

so much is in bud

Beginnings

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea -“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
– so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
– we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river cannot
already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet-
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt that we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

~Denise Levertov, (1923 – 1997)

start again

. .

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great
roots . . .

~Robert Bly

folded

There is something in me
maybe someday to be written;
now it is folded, and folded,
and folded,
like a note in school.

~Sharon Olds