Category: Poetry

  Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I will give you a colour, like a new flower in a bud vase on your desk. Every day I will paint […]

    Later someone told me they had found out the universe is a kind of strip that twists around and joins itself, and I believe it, sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each […]

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart. Not lazy. When a lazy man, they say, looks toward heaven, the angels close the windows.   Oh angels, keep […]

  Then in the valley, where the brook went by, Silvering the ledges that it rippled from, An isolated slip of fallen sky, Epitomizing heaven in its sum,— An iris bloomed—blue, as if, flower-disguised, The gaze of Spring had there materialized.     From Madison Julius Cawein, The Wild Iris

let us lie upon the sky and look upon the grass where the rain drops grow and the dew drops listen   on the newly mown clouds falls the shadow of the hills where the white flowers fly and the black birds blossom   the roots of the apple tree are waving in the breeze […]

  All the others translate: the painter sketches A visible world to love or reject; Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches The images out that hurt and connect. From Life to Art by painstaking adaption Relying on us to cover the rift; Only your notes are pure contraption, Only your song is an absolute […]

  we stumble through the pain of every day knotted with need to get things done doing the clown walk, like a walking swan.   and death, our falling off the earth we walk on every day is the swan’s apprehensive flop   into the water that is his home. It takes him to itself […]

  the sunlight moving through it,   illuminating, holding the flower open like a high clear note, an ecstatic widening   which arrives, arrives.   sunlight, like vision, making clear the tiniest   hidden veins.   From Kate Northrop, The Geranium

  This is love: to fly towards a secret sky                 to open the curtains, again and again.           to let go of life.               How do you find it? Easy.               Take just one step (but don’t move your feet)              see the world as unseeable            and forget the seeming self. I said […]

  How I loved those spiky suns, rooted stubborn as childhood in the grass, tough as the farmer’s big-headed children—the mats of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe. How sturdy they were and how slowly they turned themselves into galaxies, domes of ghost stars barely visible by day, pale cerebrums clinging to life on tough green […]

  The Pilgrim way has led to the Abyss. Was it to meet such grinning evidence We left our richly adorned ignorance? Was the triumphant answer to be this? The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss. We who must die demand a miracle. How could the eternal do a temporal act. The Infinite become […]

  Is it not by his high superfluousness we know Our God? For to be equal a need Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling Rainbows over the rain And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows On the domes of deep sea-shells, And make the necessary embrace of breeding Beautiful also as fire, Not […]

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists As fresh and pure as water from a well, Our hands made new to handle holy things, The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed Till earth and light and water entering there Gave back […]

  Then new happenings happened, and said: ‘Don’t move a muscle. Something overwhelmingly generous is on its way.’   The sun is a fountain of light. It is you. I am a tree shadow on the earth. You make angles curve.     The soul at dawn is the night sea that slowly begins to […]

  and then my heart pulled itself apart and, filled to the brim with a new light, overflowed with fresh life.   now even the heavens are thankful that because of love i have become the giver of light   Rumi, ghazal  1393

The windless northern surge, the sea-gull’s scream, And Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae. I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd’s dream, Christ, man and creature in their inner day. How could our race betray The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake Who chose this form and fashion for our sake? The Word made flesh […]

If you want what visible reality can give, then you are: an underling. If you want the unseen world, you haven’t discovered the truth. Both wishes are stupid. Don’t worry about it. It’s so easy not to know that absolutely all you really want is love’s confusing joy.   Rumi

  have you not noticed what the world is really like? it is like moonlight shining in dewdrops shaken, flying, from the beak of a crane.   Dogen