The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself.  Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return.  It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it.  Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

​    - Lisel Mueller 

Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly
Let it cut more deep
Let it ferment and season you as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft,
my voice so tender,
my need for God absolutely clear.

    - Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

And we know, when Moses was told
    in the way he was told,
"Take off your shoes", he grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
    He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way
    the fire licking at his heels loved him.
As if the lion earth could roar

and take him in one movement.
    Every step he took
from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered as if he knew
    the constant witness of the ground
and remembered his own face in the dust

the moment before revelation.
    Since then thousands have felt
the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.

Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,
    your own house turned to ashes.
Everything consumed so the road could open again.

Your entire presence in your eyes
    and the world turning slowly
into a single branch of flame.

    - David Whyte

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by.  Or how strangers still say "bless you"
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague.  "Don't die," we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up.  Mostly, we don't want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it.  To smile
at them and for them to smile back.  For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now.  So far
from tribe and fire.  Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here,
have my seat,"  "Go ahead--you first,"  "I like your hat."

​    - Danusha Lameris

Anthropocene

Even the word feels claustrophobic
Like endless lines and crowds
Of one color only.  A species

Alone without context.
How lonely we have made
Ourselves, how poor.

It is not survival,
But greed that guides, drives
Us, leaves us lonely

On a denuded plain,
Without the container, the completion
Of other life to embrace us.

What will we do when only people
Populate our planet, our poems?
Who will we be

When we've forgotten our companions,
The oak, the fox, the prairie grass and
The hen hidden within.

Who will we be when
All around us
Are mirrors and madness?

​    - Rebecca del Rio

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

    - e e cummings