Category: Poetry

See the movement in the poem – and make the connections for yourself!   Everything flows    upward and over        chalk-white walls          with the ordered freedom              of a trellised creeper          wreathed and scrolled      in a densely choral        anthem of ornament.           Nimble angels                                                                                 poise above     in […]

    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

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 great web. Denise Levertov, Web

  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

 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 […]

  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 more intense than blaze […]

  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 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-angled light Would congregate endlessly. […]

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 white birch to the apple tree.   From […]

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

  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 belief, […]

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 the peace of […]

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 space towering of shadows of […]

self-blessing   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 and in touch it is lovely until […]

brightness   love is a place & through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places   From e.e.cummings, love is a place.