See the movement in the poem - and make the connections for yourself!
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Everything flows
  upward and over
      chalk-white walls
        with the ordered freedom
            of a trellised creeper
        wreathed and scrolled
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Sea
Posted on by James Woodward
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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
St David
Posted on by James Woodward
Saint David's Day
At school they told us
that it was the day
on which Jesus
and a host of angels
came to Wales.
There was sunshine
full of endless song
- and the sould of David
was borne away
to heaven.
I thought,
'He must have been
a good man
for God's Son
to come for him.'
intricate
Posted on by James Woodward
Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:
designed, beyond
all spiderly contrivance,
to link, not to entrap:
elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined;
shaking, changing,
forever
forming,
transforming:
all praise,
all praise to the
gre
the face in the mirror
Posted on by James Woodward
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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
Dark
Posted on by James Woodward
 Like the water
 of a deep stream, love is always too much.
We did not make it. Though we drink till
we burst we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
 to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
midwinter spring
Posted on by James Woodward
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Midwinter spring is its own season...
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow m
Who am I?
Posted on by James Woodward
 Real
I’m not a symbol
I’m not a statistic
I’m not the inches in somebody’s column.
I’m not admirable, but
I’m not pitiable either.
I’m simply human.
If you turned me inside out,
you’d find fury, fear, refret and sorrow
struggling with the love and the
Quelle est cette odeur agréable?
Posted on by James Woodward
Quelle est cette odeur agréable,
Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?
S’exhale-t’il rien de semblable
Au milieu des fleurs du printemps?
Quelle est cette odeur agréable
Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?
What is this pleasant fragrance,
shepherds, which delights all our
focus
Posted on by James Woodward
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Is Heaven a Place -- a Sky -- a Tree?
Location's narrow way is for Ourselves --
Unto the Dead
There's no Geography --
But State -- Endowal -- Focus --
Where -- Omnipresence -- fly?
From Emily Dickinson, We pray -- to Heaven
Water
Posted on by James Woodward
water
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angle
the scarlet sky
Posted on by James Woodward
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when a child leaves the breast
for solid food
it does not look back
it grows
the seed is nourished by earth
then spreads towards the sun
so: taste the scarlet sky
open towards wisdom
hide no longer in yourself
you came here like a star
that had no name
enter the nigh
Stillness
Posted on by James Woodward
stillness
Whatever you hoped,
you will not find yourselves in the garden,
among the growing plants.
Your lives are not circular like theirs:
your lives are the bird's flight
which begins and ends in stillness--
which begins and ends, in form echoing
this arc from the
The métier of blossoming
Posted on by James Woodward
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
 swift from sheer
 unswerving impetus!
If we could blossom out of ourselves,
giving nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!
From Denise Levertov, The métier of blossoming
Where is true religion to be found?
Posted on by James Woodward
It may indeed be phantasy, when I
 Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings ;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be ; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this
Rain
Posted on by James Woodward
Rain
The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.
The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.
A face I know is beautiful--
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And
in a different light?
Posted on by James Woodward
towering of shadows of clouds
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me
into December? a lowland
of space, perception of
those things that don’t flower?
Posted on by James Woodward
self-blessing
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The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words an
love is a place
Posted on by James Woodward
brightness
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love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
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From e.e.cummings, love is a place.
Faith
Posted on by James Woodward
Faith
I want to write about faith,
    about the way the moon rises
       over cold snow, night after night,
faithful even as it fades from fullness,
    slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
         sliver of light before the final dark
