​When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

    - David Whyte

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

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

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me.  When all the shock of white 
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

​    - Ada Limon

You are not surprised at the force of the storm--
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Joanna Macy

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money -

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.  Remember?

There was no   Nature.  No
them.  No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up    to what we were
- when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all  -  nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one.  No was
No verb    no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is  is  is  is  is

All    everything    home

     - Marie Howe