Category: Poetry

  Time takes hold of us like a draft upward, drawing at the heats in the belly, in the brain You told me of setting your hand into the print of a long-dead Indian and for a moment, I knew that hand, that print, that rock, the sun producing powerful dreams A word can do […]

  When the familiar is suddenly strange Or the well known is what we yet have to learn, And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change; By whom, and by what means, was this designed? The whispered incantation which allows Free passage to the phantoms of the mind? By you; by those deceptive cadences Wherewith […]

  We are the time. We are the famous metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure. We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still. We are the river and we are that Greek that looks himself into the river. His reflection changes into the waters of […]

Anger and tenderness: my selves. And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities. Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius to spin and weave in the same action from her own body, anywhere — even from a broken web. From Adrienne Rich, Integrity

    we are the face in the mirror and we are the mirror itself. Here, now, right now, we taste the eternal. Yes, we are pain and yes, we are the medicine for pain. We are sweet cold water and the jar, from which it pours. Rumi

  Let us return to imperfection’s school. No longer wandering after Plato’s ghost, Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless, We must at last renounce that ultimate blue And take a walk in other kinds of weather.   From Adrienne Rich, Stepping backward

 How can you stand it—looking at things? For example, the geranium out on the patio, the single pink blossom in the sun? Or stand the sunlight  moving through it, illuminating, holding the flower open like a high clear note, an ecstatic widening which  arrives, arrives.  from Kate Northrop, The geranium

WHEN the sea is everywhere from horizon to horizon .. when the salt and blue fill a circle of horizons .. I swear again how I know the sea is older than anything else and the sea younger than anything else. From Carl Sandburg, North Atlantic

    ‘Twas the old road — through pain — That unfrequented one — With many a turn — and thorn — That stops — at Heaven. From Emily Dickinson, ‘Twas the old road

We are the time. We are the famous metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure. We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still. We are the river and we are that Greek that looks himself into the river. His reflection changes into the waters of the […]

  Gone were but the Winter, Come were but the Spring, I would go to a covert Where the birds sing. Where in the whitethom Singeth a thrush, And a robin sings  In the holly-bush. Full of fresh scents  Are the budding boughs  Arching high over A cool green house: Full of sweet scents,  And […]

  I wrote a poem on the mist And a woman asked me what I meant by it. I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist, how pearl and gray of it mix and reel, And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening into points of mystery quivering with […]

    I can never forget that scrap of a song I once heard in the early dawn in the midst of the din of the crowd that had collected for a festival the night before: “Ferryman, take me across to the other shore!” In the bustle of all our work there comes out this […]

 a stone at dawn  cold water in the basin  these walls’ rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties  that passed as faces, grace: the unction  of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet  of the unnamed  the faceless   Amy Clampitt

    happy are we who are free from attachment,  feeders on rapture shall we be, like the gods of brilliant light. The Buddha, from the Dhammapada

My bedroom is high in the north wall of this great fortress and from the windows the sun in the morning and  evening reveals its special splendour reminding me of this wonderful piece of Dickinson   An ignorance a Sunset Confer upon the Eye — Of Territory — Color — Circumference — Decay — Its Amber […]