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
IÂ
curves
Posted on by James Woodward
Â
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
very intense
Posted on by James Woodward
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.
iris
Posted on by James Woodward
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.
Fr
a crowd of stars
Posted on by James Woodward
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or
Balance
Posted on by James Woodward
So much struggling –
realising that I need a balance
between reaching out and reaching in.
I need to do some things just for me,
like paint and play,
and read and build sandcastles.
I need to stop
for a long time,
to think about that.
Where did I miss it? Lose it?
For joy is
upside down
Posted on by James Woodward
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
delight
Posted on by James Woodward
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 c
the swan
Posted on by James Woodward
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 t
veins
Posted on by James Woodward
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,
to fly towards a secret sky
Posted on by James Woodward
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
dandelion
Posted on by James Woodward
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
ba
Innocence and Judgement?
Posted on by James Woodward
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 I
blossom
Posted on by James Woodward
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 breed
The Transfiguration
Posted on by James Woodward
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
smile
Posted on by James Woodward
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
fresh life
Posted on by James Woodward
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 Incarnate One
Posted on by James Woodward
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 an
love's confusing joy
Posted on by James Woodward
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.
impermanence
Posted on by James Woodward
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