When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.
​
​    - Joyce Sutphen

Is the question from the back of the room; I cannot
Quite see the student asking it, but it’s deep-voiced
And challenging and I assume it’s a guy. Because I
Want to rub music and language together and gawk
At the flames, I say. Because poetry, if it takes fire,
Cracks people’s masks, and assaults arrogance, and
Sucks you beneath the surface of words towards why
We use them. Because we have been singing before
There ‘were’ words and it’s healthy to remember that.
Because the great poems are about you and me both
And there is damned little we will be able to discuss
In the normal flow of the river and it’s good for both
Of us to stand together quietly for a while in a poem.
Because why the hell not ? What is it exactly that we
Should count as time better spent ? You cannot spare
Two minutes for a poem ? Sure, it might be pompous
Arty muck, and you demand your two minutes back,
But what if it isn’t ? What if it shivers you, or startles
You awake, or makes you weep remembering a time
When you sang all day too, and everything was made
Of music and light and colors and slabs of shimmer ?
‘What if’, brother – that’s my answer to your question.

    - Brian Doyle

​The sound of a bell
Still reverberating,
or a blackbird calling
from a corner of the field,
asking you to wake
into this life,
or inviting you deeper
into the one that waits.

Either way
takes courage,
either way wants you
to be nothing
but that self that
is no self at all,
wants you to walk
to the place
where you find
you already know
how to give
every last thing
away.

The approach
that is also
the meeting
itself,
without any
meeting
at all.

That radiance
you have always
carried with you
as you walk
both alone
and completely
accompanied
in friendship
by every corner
of the world
crying
Allelujah.

    - David Whyte

​Belonging is a river
not a goal.
Every point is holy--
but you cannot linger there
without losing yourself
for you are the motion
of your journey.
No idea,
no attainment,
no goal,
can encompass
the truth
which lives only as it dies
into new life.
You are the pain--
let it go.
You are the joy--
let it go.
You are actions taken and not taken--
let them go.
You are the dream--
let it go.
Move with the mark
of the unknown upon you
and life will enter your blood like a river.
This world was always holy
and you were always a rising flame
upon its altar.

​    - Bernadette Miller

I've been seeing beetles lately.
Big and small--scary ones that only
emerge from their underground roost
to lay their eggs on my stairway;
junebugs, loitered into July,
who don't like letting go, even in death.

The little ones, metallic, remind me
of grabbing handfuls when I was ten
from the roses they loved to snuffle and chew.
Mr. Ingber would pay us a dime
for a pint jar full of their copper
and opaline green. Packed
and freighted for death, them smelled
the way that people smell when they begin to cry--
rain on hot pavement--ozone, rot.

I was old enough to know
what Mr. Ingber would do with that jar.
I should have let them go.
And now I open that jar, in me,
gasoline evaporated, beetle bodies dust,
my small repentance, late.

Maybe love is never lost.
If so, it might collect somewhere:
Mr. Ingber's love of roses,
my love for the beetles here,
all packed inside an empty jar,
waiting to be opened.

    - Chuck Madansky

​Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal--

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain--
And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.

    - Tony Hoagland

Tell me, what
would you do today
if you knew your life
to be a celebration
of this world?

Would you stop
to gather sunlight
dropping soundlessly
upon pines
beyond your window pane?

Would you court
dreams too wide
for the container
of consciousness?

Would you linger
in the terrible beauty
of uncertainty
as if the fullness of the world
depended upon your presence?

Would you cast your hopes
upon possibilities that abide
only in departure?
​
Would you become the motion
of your song,
losing itself in overtones
of delight
or despair
and returning, finally,
to the stillness
from which it all began?

    - Bernadette Miller

​​Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
Each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ear. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
Great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
Be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.

    - Susan Griffin

​It was as if a window suddenly blew open
and the sky outside the mind came flooding in.
My childhood shriveled to a close,
just like that, thread of smoke
that rose and touched a cloud - or the cloud’s
replica adrift on the slow river of thinking -
and disappeared inside it. In that dark water,
a new lily was opening, sky-white out of the muck.
It was only a glimpse, quick,
like a bird ruffling,
but I saw the flower’s
beautiful stark shape, an artichoke
brightened from within by the moon.
A path lay shadowy under my feet,
and I followed it.

    - Chase Twichell

World, world, I am scared
and waver in awe before the wilderness
of raw consciousness, because it is all
dark and formlessness; and it is real
this passion that we feel for forms.  But the forms
are never real.  Are not really there.  Are not.

​    - William Bronk