Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

The Threshold of This Life

10/1/2023

The Madonna and Child
Oil on wood, around 1520 AD, possibly by Sodoma

I was not aware of the moment
when I first crossed the threshold of this life.

What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery
like a bud in the forest at midnight!

When in the morning I looked upon the light
I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world,
that the inscrutable without name and form
had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me.
And because I love this life,
I know I shall love death as well.

The child cries out
when from the right breast the mother takes it away,
in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Keep Me Fully Glad

9/24/2023

Photo by Rodolpho Sanches Carvolho

Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.
The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Camas Lilies

9/10/2023

Photo by Aaron Cloward

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down--
papers, plans, appointments, everything--
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

- Lynn Ungar

roots

7/23/2023

Living from the Depths by Doug Van Houten

call it our craziness even,
call it anything.
it is the life thing in us
that will not let us die.
even in death's hand
we fold the fingers up
and call them greens and
grow on them,
we hum them and make music.
call it our wildness then,
we are lost from the field
of flowers, we become
a field of flowers.
call it our craziness
our wildness
call it our roots,
it is the light in us
it is the light of us
it is the light, call it
whatever you have to,
call it anything.

- Lucille Clifton

What's Left

5/28/2023

- for Peter Hennessy

I used to wait for the flowers,
my pleasure reposed on them.
Now I like plants before they get to the blossom.
Leafy ones -- foxgloves, comfrey, delphiniums --
fleshy tiers of strong leaves pushing up
into air grown daily lighter and more sheened
with bright dust like the eyeshadow
that tall young woman in the bookshop wears,
its shimmer and crumble on her white lids.

The washing sways on the line, the sparrows pull
at the heaps of drying weeds that I've left around.
Perhaps this is middle age. Untidy, unfinished,
knowing there'll never be time now to finish,
liking the plants -- their strong lives --
not caring about the flowers, sitting in the weeds
to write things down, look at things,
watching the sway of shirts on the line,
the cloth filtering light.

I know more or less
how to live through my life now.
But I want to know how to live what's left
with my eyes open and my hands open;
I want to stand at the door in the rain
listening, sniffing, gaping.
Fearful and joyous,
like an idiot before God.

- Kerry Hardie

Wild Rose Goes for a Drive with God

4/30/2023

Aloha by Michael Zieve
www.artworkarchive.com/profile/michael-zieve

Wild Rose Goes for a Drive with God

But first, she takes a few slugs of absinthe.
The pale green thrill of it blazes in her throat.

God walks in just as she finishes her glass.
God finishes the bottle. Then he says,

Are you nervous? Wild Rose doesn't hesitate
to say, No way. I am ready for anything.

God says they're going for a spin.
Wild Rose doesn't care where. All she wants

is for God to show her a real good time. And
she is open to what that means. Here,

says God, as they arrive at the car,
climb in. He opens the driver's seat door for her.

She pours her long legs in. There's no brake, she sees.
No rearview mirror. No reverse. No safety belts.

A big back seat. Oh yeah, she says, and revs the engine.
The night smells like licorice, like sweat.

- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Earth, Isn't This What You Want? (excerpt)

4/23/2023

Under Redwood by Michael Zieve
www.artworkarchive.com/profile/michael-zieve

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Ninth Duino Elegy
translation by Anita Burrows and Joanna Macy

******************************

Earth, isn't this what you want: invisibly
to arise in us? Is it not your dream
to be some day invisible? Earth! Invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your insistent commission?
Earth, dear one, I will! Oh, believe it needs
not one more of your springtimes to win me over.
One, just one, is already too much for my blood.
From afar I'm utterly determined to be yours.
You were always right and your sacred revelation is the intimate death.

Behold, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows less...surplus of existence
is welling up in my heart.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Ninth Duino Elegy
translation by C. F. MacIntyre

******************************

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday? –O Earth: invisible
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over – one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller… Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Ninth Duino Elegy
translation by Stephen Mitchell

October

10/16/2022

I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.

- Don Thompson

What a Jar Can Hold

7/3/2022

Art by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

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

A Meeting

6/26/2022

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

- Mary Oliver

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